A Recent Behaviour Analytic Approach to the Self

The ‘self’ is a highly popular concept in modern psychology, but is ill-defined in operational terms. The term ‘self’ is not a technical term in traditional behaviour analysis and for many decades, no attempt was made to define this concept. Skinner provided an early behavioural definition as ‘responding to one’s own responding’. More recently, relational frame theorists have argued that a fully adequate definition needs to incorporate arbitrarily applicable relational responding, which is seen within RFT as the core skill underlying verbal behaviour. This paper sets forth the RFT conception of self, from its roots as verbal responding (i.e., relationally framing) to one’s own responding, through its development in terms of deictic relations, to its elaboration as three forms of self-responding referred to as self-as-content, self-as-process and self-as-context. Subsequently, it will compare the RFT approach to self with those taken by a number of alternative psychological accounts.