Relational Self

The relational self stands as one of the most generative and contested constructs in the depth-psychology corpus, marking a decisive shift away from the Cartesian assumption that selfhood is bounded by the individual body or skull. Daniel Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology furnishes the most sustained theoretical architecture: the mind is explicitly ‘embodied and relational,’ and a relational self ‘embraces the interconnected nature of our lives,’ complementing rather than replacing an internal self. For Siegel, the self is not a stable singular noun but a ‘plural verb’—a process of ‘selfing’ linking multiple selves across time and relational context, with emotion serving as the central organizer integrating embodied and relational processes. Allan Schore’s neurobiological account grounds the relational self in early dyadic affect regulation, locating its origins in the orbitofrontal-limbic system shaped by primary caregiving. Attachment theorists—Sroufe, Harter, Lyons-Ruth—contribute the empirical scaffolding, demonstrating that self-states are literally constructed within caregiving matrices and that ‘implicit relational knowing’ encodes how one does things with others. Paul Ricoeur offers the philosophical counterpoint, insisting that selfhood requires the recognition of the other’s alterity—that the self perceives itself as ‘another among others.’ Across these positions, a key tension persists between the relational self as developmental achievement requiring integration of multiple attachment-derived self-states, and the relational self as ontological claim that the individual was never truly separate to begin with.

In the library 17 passages

A ‘relational self’ would embrace the interconnected nature of our lives. Who we are is more than just our bodily processes. Through the various principles of complexity, connectionism, and information processing, we can come to see how our internal and our relational processes both shape our experience of self.

Siegel introduces the relational self as a necessary complement to the internal self, arguing that complexity theory and connectionism reveal how both embodied and relational processes jointly constitute selfhood.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis

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The mind is embodied, not just ‘enskulled.’ And the mind is also relational, not a product created within a body or its brain in isolation… one implication is that we don’t ‘own’ our minds—that we, our individual ‘selves,’ are interdependent

Siegel presents the foundational ontological claim that the mind’s relational nature means individual selves are constitutively interdependent rather than autonomous.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis

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the ‘self’ is not a singular noun, but rather is a plural verb. We are not just an isolated, separate self, but an ever-emerging process of ‘selfing’ linked with other evolving selves over time.

Siegel reformulates the self as a processual, relational verb—‘selfing’—emerging from both within-ness and between-ness, grounded in Sroufe’s and Harter’s developmental research.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis

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The ‘self,’ as we’ve seen, can be experienced more freely when considered as a plural verb, an interconnected selfing experience, rather than as a fixed, isolated singular noun underlying the view of the separate self.

Siegel reinforces the relational self thesis by contrasting the processual, interconnected model of selfing with the reified, isolated conception of a separate self.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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The core of the self lies in patterns of affect regulation that integrate a sense of self across state transitions, thereby allowing for a continuity of inner experience. Dyadic failures of affect regulation result in the developmental psychopathology that underlies various forms of later forming psychiatric disorders.

Schore locates the neurobiological origin of the relational self in dyadic affect regulation, establishing that early caregiver interactions sculpt the very core of self-continuity.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting

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Our minds are relational: Andersen, Susan, and Serena Chen. ‘The Relational Self: An Interpersonal Social-Cognitive Theory.’ Psychological Review 109 (2002): 619–45.

Keltner cites Andersen and Chen’s social-cognitive theory as the empirical basis for the claim that minds are inherently relational, linking the concept to the awe literature’s interest in self-transcendence.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting

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Moving from being not only ‘me’ but also a ‘we’ involves the differentiation of a personal, individual self and then the linkage of this self to another… Me plus We = MWe.

Siegel’s interpersonal integration framework operationalizes the relational self through the equation MWe, arguing that healthy selfhood requires both differentiation and linkage with others.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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Through both positive and negative affect-laden interactions with their primary caregivers, children acquire ‘implicit relational knowing,’ in other words, ‘how to do things with others’… Encoded in procedural memory, the legacy of attachment constrains the meaning we make of each moment.

Ogden demonstrates how the relational self is encoded procedurally through attachment history, framing relational capacities as learned patterns accessible to clinical transformation.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting

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the self perceives itself as another among others. This is the sense of Aristotle’s ‘each other’ (allélous), which makes friendship mutual.

Ricoeur, drawing on Aristotle’s ethics of friendship and solicitude, argues that the self’s reflexive self-esteem is constitutively altered by the recognition of its dependence on and equality with others.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

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The development of the relational models has shifted the focus away from intrapsychic struggles to an exploration of the interpersonal or relational difficulties that contribute to a person’s present situation.

Flores traces the clinical shift from intrapsychic to relational models, positioning self psychology and relational theory as converging frameworks for understanding addiction through attachment and the relational self.

Flores, Philip J., Addiction as an Attachment Disorder, 2004supporting

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it is not only what the child does learn that creates problems later in life, but also what the child doesn’t learn: the skills of self-regulation and relational regulation.

Dayton argues that the relational self is formed through the acquisition—or failure to acquire—skills of self- and relational regulation, linking developmental deficits directly to later relational pathology.

Dayton, Tian, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Lasting Fulfillment, 2007supporting

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Could the brain map out a sense of our being a fundamental part of the whole? Or might it be a relaxing of the brain’s construction of a neural representation of a ‘bodily me’… we could drop into direct sensory experience of being a fluent, flowing reality of energy flow.

Siegel speculatively extends the relational self toward a dissolution of bodily boundaries in nature experience, suggesting that the default mode network’s self-construction can be relaxed to reveal a more permeable, flow-based sense of identity.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020aside

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STEs contain two subcomponents: (a) reduced self-salience—fading bodily and social boundaries… and (b) connection to other people and things in the environment beyond the self (the ‘relational component’).

Yaden identifies a relational component within self-transcendent experiences that mirrors the relational self’s emphasis on connection beyond bodily boundaries, linking depth-psychological selfhood to affective neuroscience.

Yaden, David Bryce, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, 2017aside

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The imprinted imago of self and other which derives from earliest experience is deep-rooted and colors all subsequent relationships… the present moment is flooded with the past.

Hollis, from a Jungian perspective, addresses how the primordial imago of self-and-other shapes all relational experience, situating the relational self within the broader depth-psychological tradition of the autonomous complex.

Hollis, James, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001aside

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Related terms