Self Comes to Mind

Name: Self Comes to Mind
Author: Antonio Damasio

Self Comes to Mind is a work by Antonio Damasio (2010).

Core claims

Damasio’s architecture of consciousness—protoself, core self, autobiographical self—provides the neurobiological substrate that Jung intuited as the ego-Self axis, grounding a century of depth psychological theory in the homeostatic imperatives of living tissue.
The book’s most radical claim is that consciousness did not evolve for knowing but for feeling—primordial feelings are the foundation, not the byproduct, of mind, which inverts the Cartesian hierarchy that still haunts both neuroscience and psychotherapy.
By situating the self as a process of continuous biological construction rather than a fixed entity, Damasio converges with Bosnak’s “multiplicity of selves” and Hillman’s critique of ego-as-unity, yet does so from an entirely different epistemological tradition—making this the essential bridge text between neuroscience and depth psychology.

How does Damasio’s concept of the protoself challenge or deepen Murray Stein’s reading of Jung’s transcendent self in Jung’s Map of the Soul, particularly regarding the claim that the self “lies beyond the subjective realm”?
In what ways does Bosnak’s practice of embodied imagination in Embodiment function at the level of what Damasio calls the core self, and does this neurobiological grounding strengthen or diminish Bosnak’s appeal to Corbin’s imaginal realm?
Hillman argues in Senex and Puer that the ego is formed by the senex archetype’s “ordering and hardening” impulse; how does Damasio’s account of the autobiographical self as a narrative consolidation built on selective forgetting converge with or diverge from Hillman’s archetypal account of ego-rigidity?