Sociological Theory: Skeleton Key 1 to Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, © Dan Krier 

Your question/statement is insightful: social theorists frequently probe the boundary between acting and behaving. In a Self and Society course, I taught William James' short book, Talks to Teachers, that contains a chapter on habits. His answer (that I can confirm from my own experience) is that consistent repetition of an act creates a channel into which conduct readily slips, transforming acts that require conscious decision into more-or-less unconscious habits. I found a copy of the chapter here. www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/tt8.html

I am glad you liked the video.

Good comment -- perhaps best phrased as a traditional tendency toward singularity of self and a modern necessity for multiplicity.

Check out the show Mindhunter on Netflix. There are direct references to Durkheim and Goffman, though not accurate. However, it is quite interesting how the show uses ideas of masks and true selves, in evolving characters as the show progresses. You can also see a direct reflection of Goffman in the performances serial killers out up in the show trying mold the way public and media views them.

@@trivikramam1171 Thanks for the reply to Nai's question. Hervey Cleckley's Mask of Sanity -- the great study of psychopathy -- is still worth reading and you can borrow a copy for free at archive.org: archive.org/details/maskofsanityatte00clec

Yes, as a working definition that is enough. To take it further, think of existential selves as: * real, embodied actors who expend energy to animate social roles in effective performances, * performers whose "being" is determined by the ins-and-outs of role performances, * the part of the self who maintains awareness that a social role is "not me" or at least "not all of me" even while being performed.

@@socialtheory Thank you. That's interesting. Is the existential self only a theoretical concept or does it exist in reality? Can we feel or realize our own existential self if it is real?

@@vijrumbhanam9200 Yes, you should be able to "discover" the existential self when reflecting upon your own life. When teaching this book, I frequently ask students to test the validity of the ideas against the "data" of their own experience and the experience of others in cultural products like memoirs, novels, cinema, etc. Students who have performed actual dramatic roles in a school play or who have performed formal ceremonial roles in church functions immediately grasp the difference between their own "existential self" and the "performed self." I often teach that worthwhile social theory is a discovery rather than a creation. Good theory provides us with a conceptual handle to better grasp previously unnamed territories that were always already there in social nature. Most of my students experience a kind of shock of recognition when reading this book -- they realize now that they have been an existential self all along.

@@socialtheory Thanks again. How to go about "discovering" the existential self? I have only read "Presentation of self......" as a casual reader. Some theories say it's hard to know the existential self. I feel like when one is calm and feels ok with a particular presentation or character, that is when that person is the most close to his/her existential self. But still I feel that's only a part of the existential self. Example: one may shed all their inhibitions and be free when they're with their trusted partner (husband/wife/lover). But, the same person maybe equally free with their parents to whom he/she may not show their romantic or sexual self. Where does the existential self lie? Is it in parts in all the presentations? I'm a bit confused with that. It'd be great if you could recommend further readings.

Yes, agreed.

This authoritarian self dynamic appears in interviews with SS killers conducted by Henry Dick's in Licensed Mass Murder, where convicted war criminals pointed to the need to safeguard the "authentic self" behind complicit false SS fronts as a mitigating factor in their crimes. They claimed that SS personas (sometimes cold-blooded, sometimes enthusiastic) were animated under duress to put the machine off the scent of their true "authentic self" (humanitarian, caring, compassionate). The whole concept of the "authentic self" is called into question by Dicks, as it is throughout Goffman's PSIEL.

@@socialtheory Yes. In the book, “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland,” Christopher Browning describes how a group of respectable good-natured policemen, in response to the psychopathology of war, engage in acts of criminality they never imagined they would be capable of committing. I agree that we can not identify a single authentic self; humans adapt and transform in response to changing circumstance, experiences and insights. So any self is a moving target. No pun intended. However, I think that for most of us, beneath our many social identities, there is a private core identity that we see as our authentic self. That self is made up of recurring patterns of thoughts and behaviors that feel natural to us, even as we may be a critical of them. Then there are the deep philosophical questions of identity and consciousness far beyond this conversation. Thanks for your talk and for the dialogue!

Thank you for your nice comments. A good place to begin might be with a document I wrote about 15 years ago that I share with undergraduates in introductory courses. It is meant to be a little unserious and irreverent, but it does a decent job of framing the project of sociology: faculty.augie.edu/~swart/monkeys.pdf The textbook I use in my own introduction to sociology course focuses upon social problems/social policy (Wright and Rogers: American Society How it Really Works). One of the authors, Erik Olin Wright, has unfortunately died, and I doubt it will ever be updated, but it is a straight-forward introduction to a sociological view of American society. The book is still available: I found an online version of it that you can scan through here: sociologicalfragments.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/wright-and-rogers-2015-american-society-how-it-really-works.pdf Other good books to get started: Invitation to Sociology by Peter Berger or any decent sociological theory textbook (perhaps by George Ritzer or Lewis Coser).

Yes, even totemic societies double the self upon social initiation. So these are tendencies: traditional societies tend toward self-singularity while modern societies necessitate multiplicity.