These two lectures are based on an excerpt from the book Dr. Peikoff is currently writing, The One in the Many: How to Create It and Why. The book offers a new angle from which to identify complex human products and systems, whether separate sciences (e.g., philosophy, physics, history), or broadly cultural manifestations (art, politics, law, education, etc.).

Dr. Peikoff defines a new trichotomy based on the nature of men's approach to the process of integration. The three possibilities in any given area are: principled, reality-based integration; principled, non-reality-based integration; or the rejection of principled integration as such - for short, Integration, Misintegration, Disintegration (I, M, D). The two lectures are taken from the chapter "The Whole Man," which applies the book's thesis to psychology, and specifically to the concept of "self." The lectures describe three essentially different types of individual: the I man, the M man, and the D man. Only the first of these can have a non-contradictory answer to the question: "Who am I?" -- i.e., only the first can have a full sense of personal identity.

Some of the material on the I man is taken from Ayn Rand's concepts of the "stylized universe" and the "anti-'Breaking the Sound Barrier' premise," which she first discussed with Dr. Peikoff in the 1950s. Neither of these concepts has yet been presented in Objectivist writings.