'I' and the 'me'

One might usefully 'compare Mead's "I" and "me", respectively, with Sartre's "choice" and "the situation". But Mead himself matched up the "me" with Freud's "censor", and the "I" with his "ego"; and this is psychologically apt.

Characteristics

The "Me" is what is learned in interaction with others and (more generally) with the environment: other people's attitudes, once internalized in the self, constitute the Me. This includes both knowledge about that environment (including society), but also about who the person is: their sense of self. "What the individual is for himself is not something that he invented. It is what his significant others have come to ...treat him as being." This is because people learn to see who they are (man or woman, old or young, etc.) by observing the responses of others to themselves or their actions. If others respond to a person as (for instance) a woman, the person develops a sense of herself indeed as a woman.

At the same time, 'the "Me" disciplines the "I" by holding it back from breaking the law of the community'. It is thus very close to the way in a man Freud's 'ego-censor, the conscience...arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment—his fellow-men—and public opinion'. It is 'the attitude of the other in one's own organism, as controlling the thing that he is going to do'.

By contrast, 'the "I" is the response of the individual to the attitude of the community'. The "I" acts creatively, though within the context of the me. Mead notes that "It is only after we have acted that we know what we have done...what we have said." People, he argues, are not automatons; Mead states that "the "I" reacts to the self which arises through the taking of the attitudes of others." They do not blindly follow rules. They construct a response on the basis of what they have learned, the "me". Mead highlighted accordingly those values that attach particularly to the "I" rather than to the me, "...which cannot be calculated and which involve a reconstruction of the society, and so of the 'me' which belongs to that society." Taken together, the "I" and the "me" form the person or the self in Mead's social philosophy. According to Mead, there would be no possibility of personality without both the "I" and the "Me".