The Self

SELF
This article will consider the nature of Self through modern precepts, critiquing Freudian psychology.
Common definition:

A view of Self.

The Self. A belief in the discrete nature of the individual (Ericsson). It is the factor that separates the individual from the rest of the world, which is thereby seen as a reflection of the individual. While Self is separate from reality, reality somehow is not correspondingly separate from Self.




Self is perceived as a reality, evidenced through events. We do not always feel ‘real’, only at times. Those times we feel ‘real’ are understood as a whole. The integration of Self is therefore part of the way we have constructed reality. The Self is contingent, but we must experience it as a whole, not of discrete divisible parts.



Self event self event
Freud’s fragmentation

Freud took the Self as their own and reshaped it into the Ego, ID and Superego, thereby breaking it down into several units. These reflect psychic energies (Ego. ID) and the negotiated relationship with the environment (Superego). Also, the ID feeds the Ego with psychic energy. These arrangements reflect the psychic health of the individual. Self has become a physic barometer, conditioned by medical opinion. The Self operates through the spectrum of Doctors and no longer exists in an ideal form. The Self reflects time, crucial to Freudian psychological ideas, completely determined by a relationship to drives and the environment. Self is negotiated by human authority.
Self is a mechanism created through a process of drives (currents of energy) that according to availability and accessibility creates a unravelled relationship with objects (people/things/ideas).

This is crushingly negative, and represents the lowest point of deductive, psychological reasoning. In many ways, it has proved difficult to retrieve Self from this microscope. Even with Berne or Ericsson concepts of Self are concerned with relationships and evidenced through observation by external operators.

Freud’s concepts, picked up while at university from studying Brentano, can lead to an infinite Self, benchmarked by human physical and psychic development. Try an experiment. Relax and think of your Self, roam around yourself. Space expands exponentially. Your Self appears to exist outside time. In this fashion, it is possible to grasp if not agree with Freud’s placing of Self in spatial dimensions, eliminating every day concepts of time. Freud appears to have perceived the Self as connected to external reality through the expression of drives or neurotic behaviour, and connected to time through early experiences. Achieving wholeness, that is accord with the environment, Freud reconnected the psyche with time through integration with others or ‘another’, a lover or wife.

One description of ego:

The Ego exists differently from Self, representing its surface, what succeeds activity or action. It is inseparable from physicality. In order to effect choice we tell ourselves that everything we decide is based upon independent decisions. All choices we make are events, shaped by corresponding and complementary events. They are not separated from the actions of others. Therefore the Ego flavours or decorates our activity, providing an illusion of separation. Contemplation of the Ego is not evidence of its existence.
But such deliberations leave out an essential factor. Although Self is seen as an integrative whole, this mainly alludes to the mind. The geographical and spatial elements of the body, how we actually interface with the environment, are ignored. It is often through the body that events are experienced and understood.






Experiences of Self:

The separation of Self is an illusion caused by our reflective response to stimuli and events.
It is the outward response to stimuli and involvement in events reflected back to create a sense of integrated reality. In effect, our relationship with physical objects is contingent, incomplete and accidental. By absorbing it into a false sense of wholeness we create meaning.