04 December 2016

Bandura’s basic category of a person’s characteristics is the human agency. It’s a state of our being capable representatives of our own persons. It means, like any successful agent we shall be efficient to act for our own maximum benefit. That’s the root of another Albert Bandura’s basic category -- self-efficacy. Although it isn’t the best analogy, but if we view a person as an agency, we’re always at work doing some job responsibilities to benefit ourselves. Then come the questions of when and how we shall use the benefit we gain and what we are. However, these questions are outside the theory we’re talking about. One of the tasks of psychology, as a craft, is to give a person a more effective strategy for interaction with the world around him or her. In this context, they can easily interpret alcoholism as a phenomenon.

The notion of a disorder of the self as being a core feature of schizophrenia has existed since the early days of schizophrenia research, but recent work has clarified and specified the type of self-disturbance that may be at play (Chung, 2007; Parnas, 2000; Parnas and Sass, 2001). In order to understand the type of selfdisturbance being referred to in recent phenomenological writings, it is necessary to distinguish between several ‘‘levels’’ or types of selfhood. Parnas (2003) identifies three levels of selfhood from a phenomenological perspective (see Table 1).