The I and the Me are the two phases in which, according to George Herbert Mead, every self appears. The Me is the self as an object — the self one becomes aware of when one looks at oneself from the standpoint of other people. It is composed of the organised attitudes of others which the person has taken over and made her own: the expectations of parents, teachers, castemates, colleagues and the wider community, sedimented into a definite picture of who she is and what may properly be expected of her. Because it is assembled out of shared expectations, the Me is conventional, habitual and predictable; it is the part of the self that a sociologist can describe in advance.
The I is the self as subject — the acting, responding, initiating phase of the organism. It is the answer the person actually gives to the attitudes gathered in the Me, and Mead insists that this answer is never wholly determined by them. It is spontaneous, impulsive and novel, and it is knowable only in retrospect: the moment I turn to inspect my own act, that act has already passed into memory and become part of the Me. The I, Mead writes, appears in experience only as history. This asymmetry is essential — it means that the self is not a thing but a process, perpetually running ahead of its own self-image.
The Me: society lodged inside the person
The Me is the fruit of role-taking. A child first internalises the attitudes of significant others and then, as these particular perspectives are organised into a single standpoint, the attitude of the generalised other — the community as an organised whole. What results is not one Me but a family of Mes, since a person belongs to many groups and carries the attitudes of each. Mead therefore speaks of elementary selves organised, more or less coherently, into a complete self. Self-control is, on this account, simply social control operating from within: when a clerk resists the temptation to pocket a fee, it is the internalised community that restrains him, not an external policeman.
The I: the unpredictable response
If the Me were the whole story, conduct would be a mechanical unrolling of expectations, and Mead's psychology would collapse into a theory of conditioning. The I prevents this. Faced with a situation, the organism must reconstruct its habits, and what it produces cannot be read off the situation beforehand. Mead's own example is the athlete who, in the flow of a game, makes a move no one anticipated, including himself. The I is where initiative, resistance and originality enter conduct; it is also the source of the sense of freedom, and, when the response exceeds what the community allows, of guilt. Because the I is retrospectively knowable, Mead's self has genuine indeterminacy without appealing to a soul or an uncaused will.
Thought as a conversation between the two
Mead's most fertile claim is that the I and the Me are not two entities but two moments in a single internal conversation, and that this conversation is thinking. The person indicates something to herself using significant symbols, anticipates how others would respond, and answers. Deliberation is thus social in form even when solitary — an inward rehearsal of a dialogue. Consider a woman elected to a village panchayat on a seat reserved for women. Her Me carries the whole weight of assembled expectation: that she will sign where her husband indicates and stay silent. The I is what happens when, on some particular afternoon, she asks for the accounts to be read out. Neither phase alone explains the act; the act is the conversation between them.
Why the pair dissolves the individual–society opposition
Sociology inherited a stubborn dualism: either society moulds individuals, or individuals compose society by free choice. Mead's pair dissolves it. Society enters the person as the Me, so the individual is constitutively social and not merely constrained from outside; but the person answers with the I, so society is continually remade by the responses it provokes. Conformity and creativity are the two faces of the same mechanism. This is why the concept anchors symbolic interactionism, and why it offers a micro-foundation for social change: reform movements, Sanskritising claims, new religious sects and everyday small refusals all begin as I-responses which, if others take them up, harden into new Mes for the next generation. Change, on this view, needs no external motor.
Criticisms
Four objections recur. First, the I is defined largely negatively — as whatever in conduct is not the Me — so it risks becoming a residual category, a name for the unexplained. Second, if the I is knowable only in retrospect it cannot be observed, which sits awkwardly with Mead's own empirical temper. Third, critics from the conflict tradition argue that the generalised other is not a neutral community but the perspective of dominant groups, so the Me smuggles in domination without naming it; Mead has little to say about power, property or coercion. Fourth, structuralist and Marxist readers hold that individual innovation is too thin a mechanism to explain transformations of caste, class or state. Later interactionists answered by developing the historical and institutional side of the argument — Erving Goffman on situated performance, Hans Joas on creative action — without abandoning the two-phase self.
For the UPSC answer
Define the Me as the internalised, organised attitudes of others and the I as the organism's novel response, then state at once that they are phases of one process rather than two parts. The examiner rewards the point that their conversation constitutes thought, and that the pair therefore closes the gap between individual and society instead of choosing a side. Use the I to explain social change from below and the Me to explain the durability of caste and gender expectations, with one concrete Indian illustration. Close with the standard criticisms — the I as a residual category and Mead's neglect of power — so the answer is evaluative and not merely expository.
References & further reading
- Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society. University of Chicago Press.
- Mead, G. H. (1932). The Philosophy of the Present. Open Court.
- Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Prentice-Hall.
- Joas, H. (1985). G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. MIT Press.
- Miller, D. L. (1973). George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World. University of Texas Press.
- Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human Nature and the Social Order. Charles Scribner's Sons.