The Janus-Faced Self

We connect Dunlop’s integrative article with three social-psychological insights about self-construal (e.g. as ‘me’ or ‘us’). Firstly and secondly, individuals’ flexible and context-sensitive self-construal directs how they perceive themselvesand their social context (‘self-as-actor’) and how they can exercise agency through their self (‘self-as-agent’); thirdly, self-narratives (‘self-as-author’) substantiate self-coherence and direct which contexts individuals agentically seek out. We thus suggest that the self is ‘Janus-faced’ because of its amazing potential for fluid transitions between different selves (as actors, agents and authors and at both the individual and collective levels).