self

Susan Engel... has written “We are who we are by virtue of what we have experienced, but part of who we are is determined by what we imagine.“ Through her work with children, Engel has been able to identify five phases of increasing sophistication in childhood storytelling.

First, toddlers learn they have an extended self .(connecting to memories) I

Murdoch believed that one of the core projects that each of us needs to undertake is to “unself”. “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

For Murdoch, there is no backstage self. As long as we

I count myself among a growing number of scientists who believe that the construction of self identity is not much better than the Lo-fi representations of other people we hold in our heads.

The autonomous individual that was taking form had, in Taylor’s view, three main components: the “self-responsible independence” brought to the forefront by Locke, the “recognized particularity” epitomized by Montaigne, and the “individualism of personal commitment” that was a child of Protestantism.3

The work of wellbeing is not to change the play but to be the theatre… hold your self-stories lightly and be lightly held by them.

Who you think you are--your notion of "self"-- is a mere cartoon, just as your notions of other people are cartoon versions of them, but critically these cartoons form the touchpoints of narrative that bind together our mental models of the world and our place in it.

This book reveals how our brains construct narratives for our lives, and how this process constructs our self-identity

But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.

Today, self-creation is no longer something some of us can do to set ourselves apart from the people we see as the masses, the crowd, or ‘la foule.’ Instead, it has become something that all of us ‘must’ do in order to maintain our financial and social position in a culture that sees reality as up for grabs, to garner the attention central to so mu