Selfhood occupies a contested and richly layered position across the depth-psychology corpus. Unlike the ego — the executive center of conscious personality — selfhood designates the more fundamental question of what it means to be a ‘who’ at all: persistent, ownable, narratively coherent, yet irreducible to any single mental act or bodily substrate. The literature divides broadly along several axes. The Jungian and post-Jungian tradition, represented by Samuels, Papadopoulos, and Fordham’s school, treats selfhood as rooted in an a priori archetypal structure — a primary Self that precedes ego-formation and continues to subtend it, generating individuation as its telos. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology insists instead on a dialectic of sameness and selfhood, where the latter names the reflexive constancy of a ‘who’ that narrative alone can fully articulate. Damasio approaches selfhood biologically, reconstructing it from protoself upward through autobiographical memory. Rudhyar grounds individual selfhood cosmologically, locating its ‘first moment’ in the natal chart as the seed of a cycle. Jaynes historicizes it, arguing that the consciously constructed self is a relatively recent cultural achievement. Across these divergent frameworks, common tensions recur: self as given versus self as achieved; selfhood as continuity versus selfhood as constellation of states; selfhood as isolated interiority versus selfhood as constituted through otherness.
it is within the framework of narrative theory that the concrete dialectic of selfhood and sameness — and not simply the nominal distinction between the two terms — attains its fullest development.
Ricoeur argues that narrative theory, not abstract metaphysics, is the proper arena in which the distinction between selfhood (ipse-identity) and sameness (idem-identity) becomes concretely intelligible.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
everything leads me to think that Parfit, by reason of not distinguishing between selfhood and sameness, aims at the former through the latter.
Ricoeur charges that Parfit’s reductionist dissolution of personal identity conflates selfhood with numerical sameness, thereby eliminating the ‘who’ question rather than answering it.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the dialectic of selfhood and sameness… represents the major contribution of narrative theory to the constitution of the self.
Narrative emplotment is posited as the mechanism through which temporal diversity and discontinuity are integrated into a coherent selfhood without collapsing into mere numerical identity.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
what ‘influences’ us is only the moment, and above all our first moment of selfhood… the beginning of the cycle of our individual selfhood as an organism integrating Earth-materials.
Rudhyar locates the origin of individual selfhood in the natal moment, treating it as the cosmological seed from which the entire cycle of personality unfolds.
mineness is implied in a certain manner in selfhood, but the passage from selfhood to mineness is marked by the clause ‘in each case’ which Heidegger is careful to add to the positing of mineness.
Ricoeur engages Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein to show that selfhood carries an irreducible first-person reference that distributes across all grammatical persons and thus requires otherness as its condition.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the activities of each would remain exactly true to his or her individual selfhood and destiny… Astrology cannot tell much, if anything, as to the generic selfhood; but it can deal satisfactorily with the ‘score’ or the ‘blueprint’ of the individual selfhood.
Rudhyar distinguishes generic selfhood (racial or Ray-type) from individual selfhood as a unique functional signature, asserting astrology’s competence only in charting the latter.
if the self is envisaged as being created during development, as in Kohut’s view it is, then this is antithetical to Jung’s archetypal theory and in particular to Fordham’s post-Jungian conception of an a priori primary self.
Samuels maps the fundamental theoretical divergence between a developmental-constructivist selfhood (Kohut) and an a priori archetypal selfhood (Fordham/Jung) as the central debate within post-Jungian analytical psychology.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.
Selfhood as narrative identity is constituted not prior to but through the story recounted, making character-identity inseparable from the concordant-discordant structure of emplotment.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Insofar as the body as one’s own is a dimension of oneself, the imaginative variations around the corporeal condition are variations on the self and its selfhood.
Ricoeur extends selfhood to the corporeal and terrestrial condition, arguing that the body-as-one’s-own is not external to selfhood but constitutive of its very structure.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the consciously constructed although variable, fragile, and defensive self that shakily pilots us through the alternatives of living consciously.
Jaynes historicizes selfhood as a consciously constructed — and therefore recent and precarious — achievement that supersedes the more stable but shallower verbal identity of bicameral individuals.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
the uroboros represents the original state of the Self before individual consciousness has arisen, a state of primary oneness and non-differentiation.
Neumann’s developmental schema positions the pre-egoic Self as a condition of undifferentiated wholeness from which individual selfhood must emerge through the progressive separation of ego-consciousness.
, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006supporting
the self itself that interferes with the development of the symbolic attitude in that all these problems are essentially a clinging to oneness… we are observing natural functions of the self, but possibly working destructively.
Fordham’s concept of defences of the self complicates a purely teleological view of selfhood by showing that the Self’s own regulatory functions can operate destructively under adverse developmental conditions.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
The self would derive from the brain’s capacity to accumulate and integrate knowledge about the most stable aspects of the organism… protoself and primordial feelings are the likely foundation of the material me.
Damasio constructs selfhood from the ground up, arguing that while the protoself provides a somatic foundation, the full self-phenomenon requires intermediate autobiographical processes beyond mere bodily representation.
, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010supporting
the self that I envision as capable of rebelliousness is a recent development, on the order of thousands of years, a mere instant in evolutionary time.
Damasio situates the autobiographical self historically, aligning with Jaynes in treating a reflexive, self-aware selfhood as an evolutionarily and culturally recent development.
, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010supporting
The self as the centre of the individual’s psychological universe, is, like all reality… not knowable in essence. We cannot, by introspection and empathy, penetrate to the sel[f].
Kohut’s acknowledgment — cited approvingly by Samuels — that the self is ultimately unknowable in its essence aligns his self-psychology, despite its developmental emphasis, with Jung’s apophatic treatment of the Self.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
we first need to develop a strong sense of ‘I,’ a healthy, honest and functional ego, before we can be a rightful vessel for something greater than ourselves.
Greene articulates a developmental sequence in which ego-formation is a prerequisite for, rather than an obstacle to, the fuller selfhood that emerges through solar individuation.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
anything that a man postulates or conceives of as being a greater totality than himself can become a symbol of the self — Christ or Buddha, for example.
Samuels presents the Jungian Self as a symbolic register of totality that exceeds the ego’s compass, capable of being projected onto any figure representing wholeness beyond personal identity.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
Early Glimpses of the Self: The Treasure Within. As you turn attention inward and remember your dreams, you may find early signs of the treasure.
Signell treats the Self as an inner treasure whose first intimations appear in dream imagery, positioning selfhood as an intrapsychic depth to be gradually uncovered through analytic dreamwork.
, Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Womens Dreams, 1991supporting
Within this cohesion of the specialized self emerges a continuity across time (in that self-state) of feelings, beliefs, intentions, memories, and so forth, which creates a qualitative sense of unity.
Siegel’s relational neuroscience frames selfhood as an emergent cohesion of self-states rather than a fixed entity, emphasizing temporal continuity and integrative brain functioning over any singular substrate.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
the Ascendant symbolizes the very essence of self, man’s attitude and path toward himself… It is man’s standard of values as an individual self. Thus it is the very center of the whole consciousness.
Rudhyar assigns the astrological Ascendant the symbolic role of representing the essential orientation of individual selfhood, making it the pivotal axis around which the unfolding of consciousness is charted.
She assured me of her commitment to gain control of her impulse to hurt herself but added she found she could not.
Mizen’s clinical case study illustrates the psychosomatic dimension of selfhood’s fragmentation, where the self experienced as alien drives compulsive self-harm in a dissociated enactment of inner division.
, The Self and alien self in psyche and somaaside
a ‘continuity of Jungian makes possible recurring and fruitful fusion with others in later life’… the state of identity with the mother then becomes the basis of the animus-anima, persona, and ‘the superordinate personality.’
Fordham’s developmental account traces the structural preconditions of adult selfhood — anima/animus, persona, superordinate personality — back to the primary mother-infant identity, grounding selfhood in relational history.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985aside