Self reference occupies a peculiar and philosophically charged position within the depth-psychology corpus, appearing not as a simple reflexive act but as a structural problem at the intersection of language, embodiment, consciousness, and personal identity. Ricoeur’s sustained engagement in ‘Oneself as Another’ treats self reference as the crux where semantic identifying reference and pragmatic reflexivity necessarily entangle: the ‘I’ cannot be substituted by any third-person description of ‘the one who designates himself in speaking,’ exposing an irreducible non-equivalence that defines selfhood at the linguistic level. This is not merely a grammatical curiosity; it reveals, for Ricoeur, that personhood is a ‘basic particular’ whose self-reference cannot be derived from anything more primitive. Gallagher approaches the same terrain from cognitive phenomenology, demonstrating that the capacity for self-reference is both ubiquitous and fragile—structurally complex beneath its apparent simplicity, vulnerable to dissolution in schizophrenic pathology. Damasio, meanwhile, frames self-reference neurobiologically, asking what gives the brain a ‘singular and stable reference we call self,’ locating the answer in organism-side representations rather than object-side processing. Jaynes contributes a diachronic perspective, arguing that ‘self’ as a consciously constructed referent is historically late and etymologically stratified. Across these positions, the central tension is between self-reference as a linguistic-philosophical primitive and self-reference as an emergent, embodied, and potentially breakable neuropsychological achievement.