MIND MOVES: What do you do? This question receives the most amazing answer. It is responded to by "I am ", usually with a description of one's occupational status.
The emotions we feel when called upon to give a personal account of ourselves are revealed by our words. Sadly, there are those who answer in self-deprecatory terms, "I am just a " as if one's role exclusively defines who one is. A person is never "just" anything.
Some people provide the description "I'm unemployed" as if humanity and capacity to influence other people is somehow shut down when a person is not in paid employment. The living mind is never unemployed.
Still others provide a list of words - summary qualities they believe they "possess", descriptions by other people of them or self-definitions they choose for themselves.
But describing "oneself" is a difficult business, a psychological quagmire and a selective practice. This issue of "self", of "I", "me" "myself", and of "self in relation to others" exposes philosophical and psychological terrain that have been excavated since the dawn of both disciplines. They cannot deliver definitive answers but they provide provocative new perspectives.
Some theorists deny that there is any such thing as a unified self: "personal identity" has been attacked by those neuroscientists who attribute "self" to brain function, by philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida, by psychologists like Gergen who believe that what we think of as "self" is a social construction, and by narrative therapists who believe "self" is the story we tell about ourselves, the story told about us and the unfolding story of our lives. "Self" is a life process.
While self-understanding is the quest of many, it is the privilege of few. As a species, understanding who we are, what we have been and may become will continue to exercise our imaginations, fears, desires, our psychological and philosophical investigations, statistical quantifications and spiritual endeavours forever.
This issue of self-description raised itself in a particularly curious way, for this first anniversary of this Irish Times HealthSupplement, when it was suggested columnists might like to contribute information about themselves: who we are as people behind the words that we write. This could encompass information about our "selves", our history, lives, beliefs, professional journeys, personal pilgrimages or occupational roles.
But whichever of these descriptions one chose to provide, one was confronted with answering that unanswerable question "who am I?" Because who we are does not belong in any single category, but weaves its way through every aspect of our lives: all that we are, all that we do, what we write, what we say, how we speak to and about others, and define and are defined by them. Belief and behaviour are intimately bound.
And the question is this: how does what I do become what I am? Alternatively, how do I become what I do? These dilemmas arise when we are called upon to describe ourselves for others, particularly when asked to provide a personal description of one's professional role.
It is at that moment that we, who believe we are a coherent, singular "self", find that our many selves collide. For example, one might say, I have been a child, a daughter, sister, niece, grandchild, a student, a worker, a wife, mother, a colleague, a friend. In this way, who we are depends upon our relationship with others as much as upon ourselves. Or one might say, I have been a psychologist, a psychotherapist, a writer, a columnist.
But it is only through interaction with other people in these roles that one may "be" these things - for a psychologist is created by clients and depends upon them for his or her existence as psychologist, the psychotherapist is created in each instance of therapy, a writer is a writer when read.
What appears in a newspaper column gains life when it is read by others who bring their own life stories and interpretative frameworks to it, breathing life and meaning into that written word. Philosopher Ricoeur describes this meeting of minds, this "intertextuality" through which the reader's life story and the writer's words create a new co-constructed story, so that a column does not have static singular meaning but is given new meaning each time it is read.
Nor has psychology remained static. It has informed and been informed by those who have engaged with it, theoretically, practically, academically or personally. It is as rich and varied as its diverse practitioners. It has grown and changed so that to say "I am a psychologist" is to embrace expanding theoretical positions while retaining core ethical values over time. A discipline that is alive, flexible, open, that is not stuck in singular ideology, research methodology or dogma, is something to which it is a privilege to belong.
If we are "constantly becoming", then to answer for readers "who am I", there is but one possible answer. I am what I write and I write what I am, by my words you will know me. But the meaning you take from the words will be yours. And the meaning I put on the words will be mine. We are in this endeavour together. Together, that is who we are.
• Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, Dublin.