Freedom, Responsibility, and the Self-Ideal

Arnold and Gasson’s Alternative Image of the Human Person

Abstract

This study examines Magda Arnold’s and John Gasson’s attempt to formulate an alternative image of the human person in The Human Person (1954). Focusing on Chapters 1 and 6, it reconstructs the movement from Arnold’s critique of the philosophical presuppositions underlying mechanistic and deterministic psychology to Gasson’s personalistic theory of personality. The study argues that Gasson’s doctrine of the self-ideal is not an isolated moral or religious addition to this framework, but its teleological culmination. Arnold and Gasson seek to preserve the empirical character of psychology while accounting for the unity, purposiveness, freedom, and responsibility of human action. Within this perspective, personality integration cannot arise automatically from biological or psychological tendencies, but requires an apprehended end capable of organising them. The self-ideal fulfils this function by linking subjective aspiration with an objective model of human perfection. The article also identifies several philosophical and psychological questions that deserve further independent investigation.