Perceived Self: A Cross Religion Perspective

Abstract

The present study focuses on perceived self among religious professionals of two major religions viz: Hinduism and Christianity. An ex-post facto research with exploratory orientation was conducted on 50 religious professionals (25 Priests and 25 Pujaris ) An effort was made to explore the perceived self of religious professionals. To ascertain this information Who am I? Technique by Bugental and Zelen (1950) was used. Results revealed both priests and pujari’s have a positive self perception, majority of both priests and pujari’s view themselves more in terms of their distinctive characteristics ,abilities and disabilities than in terms of the appearance of their body or impression they makes on others. The areas in which the self of the two religious professionals seems to be construed overlapped a lot (e.g. temperament, social/relational/lacking, activities, bodily characteristics etc) with the exception of few areas (for e.g. liking, disliking, achievement etc),