The article is devoted to the consideration of the phenomenon of self-determination of personality in psychology, analysis and generalization of the origins of its understanding that arose in line with various approaches and concepts, as well as a discussion of its content and principles of study from modern positions. The relevance of the problem of self-determination of human behavior is associated with a surge of interest in the scientific literature to the processes of self-understanding, to a person with freedom of choice, characterized by a conscious attitude to life, capable of overcoming himself in physical, motivational or emotional terms. At the same time, we can talk about the absence at present of clear boundaries of the very concept of “self-determination” and the difficulties of distinguishing it from concepts that are close in meaning. The review presented in the article confirms the idea of multiple centers of indeterminism in human behavior and activity, i.e. recognition of a person’s ability to implement the regulation of his life, not determined by the influence of the external environment and heredity, at different levels and from different theoretical positions. Among the approaches that present ideas about various factors of self-determined behavior, the motivational characteristics of a person in interaction with the external environment are considered within the framework of the theory of self-determination (SDT) by E. Dessy and R. Rine; generalized attitudes of a person towards himself and his activity in the concept of social learning by J. Rotter and the concept of self-efficacy by A. Bandura; the impact on human behavior of potential ideas about oneself in the concept of “Possible I” by H. Markus; the concept of the dialogic structure of the Self and the metaposition of G. Hermans; understanding of free will by E. Fromm and the ability of a person to participate in R. May’s own development; responsibility associated with the acquisition of value orientations by a person in the works of D. A. Leontiev; the concept of subjectivity in Russian psychology, developed by S.L. Rubinstein, A.N. Leontiev, L.I. Antsiferova and others. The article considers level approaches to the description of the determination of human behavior from different conceptual positions on the example of models developed by V. S. Merlin, N. A. Bershtein, S. Buller, G. Allport, J. Nutten, D. McAdams, which confirm the assumption that self-determination processes and characteristics function at qualitatively different levels of personality organization (individual, activity, value-semantic) and perform different tasks. It is concluded that the modern view of the phenomenon of self-determination should be based on the ideas of the integrity, integrity of self-determination processes, and at the same time on the ideas of their level difference, description of the specific content and mechanisms of each level. A definition of the phenomenon of self-determination is proposed as a multi-level dynamic system that provides energy, target and semantic activity of the individual and determines relative freedom in the realization of a person’s life aspirations.