Mind, Self, and Society

A posthumous book, subtitled From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, edited by Charles W. Morris from students' notes of Mead's course in social psychology at the University of Chicago. Mead argues that mind and self are not given at birth but arise in social interaction. He starts from the "conversation of gestures" among animals and shows how a gesture becomes a significant symbol when it calls out in the one who makes it the same response it calls out in others; language is the medium in which mind emerges. The self develops as the child learns to take the role of others, first in play, where it acts out single roles, and then in the organised game, where it must grasp the attitudes of the whole team. This yields the "generalised other", the community's attitude taken into the self. Mead distinguishes the "me", the organised attitudes of others, from the "I", the self's spontaneous response. The final part applies this to society.

It is the founding text of what became symbolic interactionism, and its account of the social self remains a clear alternative to treating the mind as a private inner theatre.