A distinctive feature of modern Western society is the great social and cultural importance attributed to the individual. The cultural emphasis on the person not only extends to the individual's rights (and obligations) vis-a-vis other social entities and society at large, but it also includes conceptions of the nature, the essential qualities and properties of the human being. This latter aspect is especially prominent in the extent to which modern culture is concerned with the conception of the self. This cultural preoccupation with the inner self raises several important questions regarding the dynamics of the cultural imagery of the self. Of greatest interest is the question of how personal qualities and competencies that constitute the appropriate self change in the course of modern society's long-term development. Likewise, the question of how these changes are related to other social processes, especially to economic, political, and cultural developments of modern society, calls for attention. The relevant theoretical literature suggests that major shifts in the cultural definition of the self have occurred in a similar way throughout Western society over the historical period of the twentieth century. However, there have been very few systematic empirical investigations charting the long-term historical evolution of the cultural conception of the self and relating this evolution to social processes characteristic of modern society.In this paper, we take a first step in this direction by investigating images of the self in Switzerland since the beginning of the 20th century. Our analyses are based on representative samples of personal ads (i.e., advertisements for a [marriage] partner) in two Swiss daily newspapers, covering the time period from 1900 to 1992.