The thesis entertains dualism as a valuable conceptual frame of reference in the twentieth century. For the support of this contention, the Introduction calls on the writings of Piaget, Althusser, Chomsky and Levi-Strauss. All these dualists share, in distinction from traditional past approaches to a dualistic conceptual framework, an insistance on the primacy of the empirical term (or at least on the parity of the empirical term) vis-a-vis the d')-structural or covert term in their works, which two terms, on their accounts, indismissibly underlie the phenomena they tackle in their various disciplines. The terms of the dualism of the main concern in this study, pertain to social psychology, or anthropology in the Continental sense. They are, on the one hand, (a) an updated Hegelian 'object' as contaminated with a Hegel-akin 'subject' (with the terms 'my world', 'perspective', 'lived reality', 'human reality', 'the self' as its usual expressions), and (b) the same 'object' as pure and uncontaminated with 'subject': the medium of society's 'carriership', indeed of the very being of society itself, whose positivity is overtly demonstrable in statistical charts, as Durkheim was the first to show. For that reason, not only the explicitly dualistic Continental students of the self upon whom the thesis focuses (the existentialist Sartre, Kierkegaard and Bultmann in the main), but also Durkheim figures centrally in the argument.
Another task which the thesis undertook was to show that the Hegelian, implicitly dualistic element in Mead's thought (picked up by him in Berlin: the scene of his undergraduate studies), amounts, not to a flaw spoiling the orthodoxy of his behaviourism (as usually grasped), but (when pursued and pushed to its limits), to a fruitful basis of comparison with and a valuable contribution to the works of his openly dualistic European anthropologist colleagues, just listed above. Both goals are, on the whole, implicitly achieved in the thesis, as they are, in the main, phenomenologically approached, and the method of their treatment is to allow them to transpire through a structure dictated by an abandon to their implications in experience. The dualism of Sartre's social psychology provides the major basis of comparison to Mead's implicit dualism. A by-product of this circumstance is the emergence, in the course of the argument, if not of a Sartrian ethics, at least of an ethics which is very Sartrian.