As the name implies, symbolic interactionism is most concerned with the processes and results of human communication through gestures and sounds with shared meanings. The roots of symbolic interactionist theory and its conceptualization of the social self reach back to William James, who defined the social self as those feelings regarding oneself which are derived from one's associations with others. It is this general idea that later social psychologists and sociologists used in the foundation of what Herbert Blumer christened symbolic interactionism (Turner, 1986).
John Dewey argued that "mind" is not a fixed entity, but consists only of the actual processes of thinking; an idea which dates back to Locke and Hume. This idea had a profound impact on George Herbert Mead, who is considered the founding father of symbolic interactionism. Mead (1934) believed that the mind arises from thought, not thought from mind. That is, the mind develops gradually as symbolic gestures and words are learned, thereby creating a capacity for mental representations of reality, or thoughts (Craib, 1984). It is difficult to conceive of what a mind is, if not its thoughts. Thus, Mead contended, there must be thoughts in order for there to be a mind, and thoughts are based on symbolic interaction. The infant, then develops his mind by learning to communicate with others; this is the beginning of the social self (Larson, 1973).
Aside from Dewey, Charles Horton Cooley had the greatest impact on Mead's thinking. Cooley (1969) stated that the self also arises from interpersonal communication through the ability to take the viewpoint of another and see oneself as an object rather than a subject. The three principal components of this "looking glass self" as he called it were how we imagine we appear to others, how we imagine others judge our appearance, and the feelings (e.g. pride or humiliation) which result from these imaginings. In other word...