Abstract

This study explored how the three distinct fields of psychiatry, psychology and religion treated a “self” in terms of its constituting features and cognitive taxa. To achieve the objective the micro structural approach of schema theory was applied to the representative texts of these fields by specifying and analyzing all the tokens of “self” and its derivatives. When statistical tests were applied to the data it was found that psychiatry, psychology and religion differed significantly from each other in the number of tokens. The reduction of tokens to types and the assignment of types to their hierarchically established cognitive taxa showed that religion treated the “self” more comprehensively and objectively than psychiatry and psychology did. The results are discussed in terms of the cognitive taxa to which psychiatry, psychology and religion assign the “self” to.

Keywords: Self; Schema theory; Constituting features; Cognitive taxa