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The importance of knowing yourself: your key to fulfillment

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What does it mean to know yourself?

The importance and benefits of knowing one's self, how to know yourself better, how to improve your self-knowledge, how coaching can help.

Think of the most eccentric person in your life. You know the one. 

The one who either shows up in a disheveled leather jacket or an all-black outfit and a beret. They’re somewhat aloof but always energetic. Unapologetically flamboyant, but always kind and understanding. This person chooses to be themselves, not who they’re expected to be. 

They don’t care about the world’s expectations. This sometimes gets them into trouble or attracts judging glares from nearby strangers. But, you have to admit, it would be nice to have that kind of self-confidence . And you can!

In a world rife with expectations, living authentically can feel impossible. It feels easier to have your path planned for you. But, in the long run, this will only hold you back from living a fulfilling life.

The great philosopher Socrates said it himself: “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” 

So if you’re wondering whether authenticity is worth pursuing, the short answer is “yes.” And, for the detail-oriented among you, here’s everything you need to know about the importance of knowing yourself — so you too can find your true self.

Knowing yourself is about discovering what makes you tick. Among other things, it means:

• Learning your likes and dislikes
• Unearthing your beliefs and values
• Knowing your personal boundaries
• Accepting your personality traits
• Being a better team player
• Having a clearer path in your professional life
• Understanding how you interact with others
• Recognizing your core personal values
• Increasing your capacity for self-compassion
• Having a clearer idea of your life’s purpose
• Knowing what it takes to be self-motivated
• Being more adaptable  

Ultimately, all of these things will increase your self-awareness . Being more self-aware lends to enhanced self-development, acceptance, and proactivity while benefiting our overall mental health .

We’ll be more confident, make better decisions, have stronger relationships, and be more honest .

Knowing yourself is about knowing what makes you tick. It means identifying what matters to you, your strengths and weaknesses, your behaviors, tendencies, and thought patterns. This list describes the importance and benefits of knowing one's self:

1. Despite your quirks, flaws, and insecurities, you learn self-love and acceptance. Once you do, you can walk through the world with more confidence and care less about what people think. 

2. You can change your personality flaws and improve on your weaknesses. You are empowered to become who you want to be. This will help you become a better, more well-rounded person.

3. You’ll have more emotional intelligence , which is key to knowing others. You’ll be more conscious of your own emotions and feelings, making it easier to understand another person's point of view.

4. You'll be more confident. Self-doubt disappears when you know and accept yourself, and others won't influence you as easily. It'll be easier to stand your ground .

5. You’ll forge better relationships. It’s easier to share yourself when you know yourself. You’ll also know what kind of people you get along with, so you can find your community .

6. You’ll be less stressed. Self-awareness will help you make decisions that are better for you. And when this happens, you become less stressed about what people think or whether you made the right choice. 

7. You’ll break patterns of disappointment. Y ou'll find repetitive behaviors that lead to poor outcomes when you look inward. Once you name them, you can break them.

8. You’ll be happier. Expressing who you are, loud and proud, will help you improve your well-being.

10. You'll have more self-worth. Why is self-worth important? Because it helps you avoid compromising your core values and beliefs. Valuing yourself also teaches others to respect you.

11. You'll understand your values. We can’t understate the importance of knowing your values. They will help you make decisions aligned with who you are and what you care about.

12. You'll find purpose in life. Knowing purpose in life will give you a clear idea of where you should go and what you should do. 

Getting to know yourself is hard. It involves deep self-reflection, honesty, and confronting parts of yourself you might be afraid of. But it’s a fundamental part of self-improvement .

If you need help, try working with a professional. BetterUp can help you navigate your inner world.

Now that we’re clear on the importance of knowing yourself, you might not know where to get started. Let’s get into it.

Check your VITALS

Author Meg Selig coined the term VITALS as a guide for developing self-knowledge. Its letters spell out the six core pillars of self-understanding:

These are your guides for decision-making and setting your goals. Understanding them will help you make decisions aligned with your authentic self. Here are some example values:

• Being helpful
• Trust 
• Wealth 

You can see how each of these might lead to different life choices. For example, if you value honesty, you might quit a job where you have to lie to others.

2. I nterests

Your interests are what you do without being asked, like your hobbies, passions, and causes you care about. You can then try to align your work with these interests. Here are some examples:

• Climate change. If you’re passionate about this issue, you might choose to work directly on the problem. Or you can make choices that allow for a more sustainable lifestyle, like owning an electric car.
• Audio editing. Perhaps you’re an amateur musician, and you spend your time recording and editing audio. You can start working as a freelance editor or find a job that uses these skills.
• Fitness. If you love working out and value helping others, you might consider becoming a trainer at your local gym or leading a running group.

Not all of your interests need to be a side-hustle . But being aware of them can help you make decisions that better suit your desired life. It is really about knowing your priorities.

3. T emperament

Your temperament describes where your energy comes from. You might be an introvert and value being alone. Or, as an extrovert, you find energy being around others.

Knowing your temperament will help you communicate your needs to others. 

If you’re a meticulous planner going on a trip, you should communicate this to your more spontaneous travel buddy. They might feel suffocated by your planning, leading to arguments down the road. Bringing it up before your trip will help talk it out to avoid conflict later.

4. A round-the-clock activities

This refers to when you like to do things. If you’re a writer and you’re more creative at night, carve out time in the evening to work. If you prefer working out in the morning, make it happen. Aligning your schedule with your internal clock will make you a happier human being.

5. L ife-mission and goals

Knowing your life mission is about knowing what gives your life meaning. It gives you purpose, a vocation , and something to strive for.

To find your life mission, think about what events were most meaningful to you so far. For example:

• Leading a successful project at the office
• Influencing positive change through your work
• Helping someone else succeed

There are many ways to fulfill a life mission. You can fulfill your goals with the skills and resources you have. For example, “helping someone succeed” could mean becoming a teacher or mentoring a young professional.

6. S trengths and weaknesses

These include both “hard skills” (like industry-specific knowledge and talents) and “soft skills” (like communication or emotional intelligence ).

When you do what you’re good at, you’re more likely to succeed, which will improve your morale and mental health.

Knowing your weaknesses and toxic traits will help you improve on them or minimize their influence on your life.

Are you ready to get started? There are many ways to understand your inner self:

• Write in a journal
• Step out of your comfort zone
• Track your progress
• Choose smart habits

A professional coach will encourage you to reflect on and reframe your inner thoughts and patterns. They understand that, in many cases, impulsivity holds you back from attaining your full potential.

The amygdala — an almond-sized region of the brain partially responsible for emotions — releases dopamine to reinforce impulsive behavior . This happens every time you open Facebook instead of working, eat chocolate while on a diet, or get angry at your colleagues instead of helping solve the problem.

Self-awareness can help you overcome your impulsivity. Armed with the right tools, you can break unhealthy or unwanted behaviors. 

A coach can help you meet these ends. They can teach you:

• Mindfulness: the acceptance that nothing is inherently good or bad 
• Metacognition: the awareness that your mind is the root of your actions
• Reframing: the power to react differently to an event or circumstance

These three elements can help you strengthen your self-control . You'll keep a cool head in stressful situations, communicate more effectively with others, and become a better leader overall.

In other words: by checking in with yourself, you avoid wrecking yourself.

At BetterUp , our coaches are trained in Inner Work® and understand the importance of knowing yourself. This is a lifetime journey. But together, we can make your life better.

Discover your authentic self

Kickstart your path to self-discovery and self-awareness. Our coaches can guide you to better understand yourself and your potential.

Allaya Cooks-Campbell

With over 15 years of content experience, Allaya Cooks Campbell has written for outlets such as ScaryMommy, HRzone, and HuffPost. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and is a certified yoga instructor as well as a certified Integrative Wellness & Life Coach. Allaya is passionate about whole-person wellness, yoga, and mental health.

The benefits of knowing yourself: Why you should become your own best friend

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You are a network

You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. an emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity.

by Kathleen Wallace   + BIO

Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one? Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us. Socrates thought that self-understanding was essential to knowing how to live, and how to live well with oneself and with others. Self-determination depends on self-knowledge, on knowledge of others and of the world around you. Even forms of government are grounded in how we understand ourselves and human nature. So the question ‘Who am I?’ has far-reaching implications.

Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self. A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories. Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness. John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness. Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments – involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters – to explore the psychological approach. Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms. ( Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions.

All these approaches reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences. On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity. Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.

Recognising the influence of these factors, some philosophers have pushed against such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity and multidimensionality of persons. The network self view emerges from this trend. It began in the later 20th century and has continued in the 21st, when philosophers started to move toward a broader understanding of selves. Some philosophers propose narrative and anthropological views of selves. Communitarian and feminist philosophers argue for relational views that recognise the social embeddedness, relatedness and intersectionality of selves. According to relational views, social relations and identities are fundamental to understanding who persons are.

Social identities are traits of selves in virtue of membership in communities (local, professional, ethnic, religious, political), or in virtue of social categories (such as race, gender, class, political affiliation) or interpersonal relations (such as being a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, neighbour). These views imply that it’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social relations but the relations themselves that also matter to who the self is. What philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition – are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less ‘container’, view of the self. Relational views signal a paradigm shift from a reductive approach to one that seeks to recognise the complexity of the self. The network self view further develops this line of thought and says that the self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self. The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one self.

H ow do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them. But you might still identify yourself in terms of your heritage, ethnicity, race, religion: identities that are often prominent in identity politics. You might identify yourself in terms of other social and personal relationships and characteristics – ‘I’m Mary’s sister.’ ‘I’m a music-lover.’ ‘I’m Emily’s thesis advisor.’ ‘I’m a Chicagoan.’ Or you might identify personality characteristics: ‘I’m an extrovert’; or commitments: ‘I care about the environment.’ ‘I’m honest.’ You might identify yourself comparatively: ‘I’m the tallest person in my family’; or in terms of one’s political beliefs or affiliations: ‘I’m an independent’; or temporally: ‘I’m the person who lived down the hall from you in college,’ or ‘I’m getting married next year.’ Some of these are more important than others, some are fleeting. The point is that who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity.

Let’s take a concrete example. Consider Lindsey: she is spouse, mother, novelist, English speaker, Irish Catholic, feminist, professor of philosophy, automobile driver, psychobiological organism, introverted, fearful of heights, left-handed, carrier of Huntington’s disease (HD), resident of New York City. This is not an exhaustive set, just a selection of traits or identities. Traits are related to one another to form a network of traits. Lindsey is an inclusive network, a plurality of traits related to one another. The overall character – the integrity – of a self is constituted by the unique interrelatedness of its particular relational traits, psychobiological, social, political, cultural, linguistic and physical.

Figure 1 below is based on an approach to modelling ecological networks; the nodes represent traits, and the lines are relations between traits (without specifying the kind of relation).

We notice right away the complex interrelatedness among Lindsey’s traits. We can also see that some traits seem to be clustered, that is, related more to some traits than to others. Just as a body is a highly complex, organised network of organismic and molecular systems, the self is a highly organised network. Traits of the self can organise into clusters or hubs, such as a body cluster, a family cluster, a social cluster. There might be other clusters, but keeping it to a few is sufficient to illustrate the idea. A second approximation, Figure 2 below, captures the clustering idea.

Figures 1 and 2 (both from my book , The Network Self ) are simplifications of the bodily, personal and social relations that make up the self. Traits can be closely clustered, but they also cross over and intersect with traits in other hubs or clusters. For instance, a genetic trait – ‘Huntington’s disease carrier’ (HD in figures 1 and 2) – is related to biological, family and social traits. If the carrier status is known, there are also psychological and social relations to other carriers and to familial and medical communities. Clusters or sub-networks are not isolated, or self-enclosed hubs, and might regroup as the self develops.

Sometimes her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her

Some traits might be more dominant than others. Being a spouse might be strongly relevant to who Lindsey is, whereas being an aunt weakly relevant. Some traits might be more salient in some contexts than others. In Lindsey’s neighbourhood, being a parent might be more salient than being a philosopher, whereas at the university being a philosopher is more prominent.

Lindsey can have a holistic experience of her multifaceted, interconnected network identity. Sometimes, though, her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her. Suppose that, in an employment context, she isn’t promoted, earns a lower salary or isn’t considered for a job because of her gender. Discrimination is when an identity – race, gender, ethnicity – becomes the way in which someone is identified by others, and therefore might experience herself as reduced or objectified. It is the inappropriate, arbitrary or unfair salience of a trait in a context.

Lindsey might feel conflict or tension between her identities. She might not want to be reduced to or stereotyped by any one identity. She might feel the need to dissimulate, suppress or conceal some identity, as well as associated feelings and beliefs. She might feel that some of these are not essential to who she really is. But even if some are less important than others, and some are strongly relevant to who she is and identifies as, they’re all still interconnected ways in which Lindsey is.

F igures 1 and 2 above represent the network self, Lindsey, at a cross-section of time, say at early to mid-adulthood. What about the changeableness and fluidity of the self? What about other stages of Lindsey’s life? Lindsey-at-age-five is not a spouse or a mother, and future stages of Lindsey might include different traits and relations too: she might divorce or change careers or undergo a gender identity transformation. The network self is also a process .

It might seem strange at first to think of yourself as a process. You might think that processes are just a series of events, and your self feels more substantial than that. Maybe you think of yourself as an entity that’s distinct from relations, that change is something that happens to an unchangeable core that is you. You’d be in good company if you do. There’s a long history in philosophy going back to Aristotle arguing for a distinction between a substance and its properties, between substance and relations, and between entities and events.

However, the idea that the self is a network and a process is more plausible than you might think. Paradigmatic substances, such as the body, are systems of networks that are in constant process even when we don’t see that at a macro level: cells are replaced, hair and nails grow, food is digested, cellular and molecular processes are ongoing as long as the body is alive. Consciousness or the stream of awareness itself is in constant flux. Psychological dispositions or attitudes might be subject to variation in expression and occurrence. They’re not fixed and invariable, even when they’re somewhat settled aspects of a self. Social traits evolve. For example, Lindsey-as-daughter develops and changes. Lindsey-as-mother is not only related to her current traits, but also to her own past, in how she experienced being a daughter. Many past experiences and relations have shaped how she is now. New beliefs and attitudes might be acquired and old ones revised. There’s constancy, too, as traits don’t all change at the same pace and maybe some don’t change at all. But the temporal spread, so to speak, of the self means that how a self as a whole is at any time is a cumulative upshot of what it’s been and how it’s projecting itself forward.

Anchoring and transformation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and , not either-or

Rather than an underlying, unchanging substance that acquires and loses properties, we’re making a paradigm shift to seeing the self as a process, as a cumulative network with a changeable integrity. A cumulative network has structure and organisation, as many natural processes do, whether we think of biological developments, physical processes or social processes. Think of this constancy and structure as stages of the self overlapping with, or mapping on to, one another. For Lindsey, being a sibling overlaps from Lindsey-at-six to the death of the sibling; being a spouse overlaps from Lindsey-at-30 to the end of the marriage. Moreover, even if her sibling dies, or her marriage crumbles, sibling and spouse would still be traits of Lindsey’s history – a history that belongs to her and shapes the structure of the cumulative network.

If the self is its history, does that mean it can’t really change much? What about someone who wants to be liberated from her past, or from her present circumstances? Someone who emigrates or flees family and friends to start a new life or undergoes a radical transformation doesn’t cease to have been who they were. Indeed, experiences of conversion or transformation are of that self, the one who is converting, transforming, emigrating. Similarly, imagine the experience of regret or renunciation. You did something that you now regret, that you would never do again, that you feel was an expression of yourself when you were very different from who you are now. Still, regret makes sense only if you’re the person who in the past acted in some way. When you regret, renounce and apologise, you acknowledge your changed self as continuous with and owning your own past as the author of the act. Anchoring and transformation, continuity and liberation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and , not either-or .

Transformation can happen to a self or it can be chosen. It can be positive or negative. It can be liberating or diminishing. Take a chosen transformation. Lindsey undergoes a gender transformation, and becomes Paul. Paul doesn’t cease to have been Lindsey, the self who experienced a mismatch between assigned gender and his own sense of self-identification, even though Paul might prefer his history as Lindsey to be a nonpublic dimension of himself. The cumulative network now known as Paul still retains many traits – biological, genetic, familial, social, psychological – of its prior configuration as Lindsey, and is shaped by the history of having been Lindsey. Or consider the immigrant. She doesn’t cease to be the self whose history includes having been a resident and citizen of another country.

T he network self is changeable but continuous as it maps on to a new phase of the self. Some traits become relevant in new ways. Some might cease to be relevant in the present while remaining part of the self’s history. There’s no prescribed path for the self. The self is a cumulative network because its history persists, even if there are many aspects of its history that a self disavows going forward or even if the way in which its history is relevant changes. Recognising that the self is a cumulative network allows us to account for why radical transformation is of a self and not, literally, a different self.

Now imagine a transformation that’s not chosen but that happens to someone: for example, to a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. They are still parent, citizen, spouse, former professor. They are still their history; they are still that person undergoing debilitating change. The same is true of the person who experiences dramatic physical change, someone such as the actor Christopher Reeve who had quadriplegia after an accident, or the physicist Stephen Hawking whose capacities were severely compromised by ALS (motor neuron disease). Each was still parent, citizen, spouse, actor/scientist and former athlete. The parent with dementia experiences loss of memory, and of psychological and cognitive capacities, a diminishment in a subset of her network. The person with quadriplegia or ALS experiences loss of motor capacities, a bodily diminishment. Each undoubtedly leads to alteration in social traits and depends on extensive support from others to sustain themselves as selves.

Sometimes people say that the person with dementia who doesn’t know themselves or others anymore isn’t really the same person that they were, or maybe isn’t even a person at all. This reflects an appeal to the psychological view – that persons are essentially consciousness. But seeing the self as a network takes a different view. The integrity of the self is broader than personal memory and consciousness. A diminished self might still have many of its traits, however that self’s history might be constituted in particular.

Plato, long before Freud, recognised that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement

The poignant account ‘Still Gloria’ (2017) by the Canadian bioethicist Françoise Baylis of her mother’s Alzheimer’s reflects this perspective. When visiting her mother, Baylis helps to sustain the integrity of Gloria’s self even when Gloria can no longer do that for herself. But she’s still herself. Does that mean that self-knowledge isn’t important? Of course not. Gloria’s diminished capacities are a contraction of her self, and might be a version of what happens in some degree for an ageing self who experiences a weakening of capacities. And there’s a lesson here for any self: none of us is completely transparent to ourselves. This isn’t a new idea; even Plato, long before Freud, recognised that there were unconscious desires, and that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement. The process of self-questioning and self-discovery is ongoing through life because we don’t have fixed and immutable identities: our identity is multiple, complex and fluid.

This means that others don’t know us perfectly either. When people try to fix someone’s identity as one particular characteristic, it can lead to misunderstanding, stereotyping, discrimination. Our currently polarised rhetoric seems to do just that – to lock people into narrow categories: ‘white’, ‘Black’, ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’. But selves are much more complex and rich. Seeing ourselves as a network is a fertile way to understand our complexity. Perhaps it could even help break the rigid and reductive stereotyping that dominates current cultural and political discourse, and cultivate more productive communication. We might not understand ourselves or others perfectly, but we often have overlapping identities and perspectives. Rather than seeing our multiple identities as separating us from one another, we should see them as bases for communication and understanding, even if partial. Lindsey is a white woman philosopher. Her identity as a philosopher is shared with other philosophers (men, women, white, not white). At the same time, she might share an identity as a woman philosopher with other women philosophers whose experiences as philosophers have been shaped by being women. Sometimes communication is more difficult than others, as when some identities are ideologically rejected, or seem so different that communication can’t get off the ground. But the multiple identities of the network self provide a basis for the possibility of common ground.

How else might the network self contribute to practical, living concerns? One of the most important contributors to our sense of wellbeing is the sense of being in control of our own lives, of being self-directing. You might worry that the multiplicity of the network self means that it’s determined by other factors and can’t be self -determining. The thought might be that freedom and self-determination start with a clean slate, with a self that has no characteristics, social relations, preferences or capabilities that would predetermine it. But such a self would lack resources for giving itself direction. Such a being would be buffeted by external forces rather than realising its own potentialities and making its own choices. That would be randomness, not self-determination. In contrast, rather than limiting the self, the network view sees the multiple identities as resources for a self that’s actively setting its own direction and making choices for itself. Lindsey might prioritise career over parenthood for a period of time, she might commit to finishing her novel, setting philosophical work aside. Nothing prevents a network self from freely choosing a direction or forging new ones. Self-determination expresses the self. It’s rooted in self-understanding.

The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to be. That doesn’t mean that a self doesn’t have responsibilities to and for others. Some responsibilities might be inherited, though many are chosen. That’s part of the fabric of living with others. Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live well with ourselves and with one another.

To read more about the self, visit Psyche , a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophical understanding and the arts.

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Essays About Self: 5 Essay Examples and 7 Creative Essay Prompts

Essays about self require brainstorming and ample time to reflect on who you are. See our top picks and prompts to use in your essay writing.

“Tell me about yourself.” It’s a familiar question we are asked in social situations, job interviews, or on the first day of class. It’s also a customary essay writing topic in schools to prepare students for future career interviews, cover letters, and, most importantly, to assist individuals in assessing their personalities. 

Self refers to qualities of one’s identity or character. It’s a broad topic, but many find it confusing. Before your get started on this topic, learn how to write personal essays to make this challenging topic easier to tackle.

5 Essay Examples

1. essay on defining self by anonymous on wowessays.com, 2. long essay on about myself by prasanna, 3. self discovery: my journey to understanding myself and the world around by anonymous on samplius.com, 4. how my future self is my hero by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 5. essay on self-respect by bunty rane, 7 writing prompts on essays about self, 1. who am i, 2. a look at my personality, 3. my life: a self-reflection, 4. my best and worst qualities, 5. reasons to write about myself, 6. overcoming challenges and mistakes, 7. the importance of self-awareness.

“Google provided a definition of self as a “person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, esp. considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.” (Google.com, 2013) This may be as simple as this, but the word “self” is far more complicated than the things that make an individual different from other people.”

The author defines self as the physical and psychological way of perceiving and evaluating ourselves, which has two aspects. First is the development of an existential self which includes awareness of being different from others. Meanwhile, the second aspect is when someone realizes their categorical self or that they have the same physical characteristics as others. 

The essay includes three aspects of self-definition. One is sell-image, or how a person views himself. Two is self-esteem, which dramatically affects how a person values ​​and carries himself. And three is the ideal self, where people compare their self-image with their ideal characteristics, often leading to a new definition of themselves.

“Each person finds their mission differently and has a different journey. Thus, when I write about myself, I write about my journey and what makes the person I am because of the trip. I try to be myself, be passionate about my dreams and hobbies, live honestly, and work hard to achieve all that I want to make.”

Prassana divides her essay into sections: hobbies, dreams, aspirations, and things she wants to learn. Her hobbies are baking and reading books that help her relax. She’s lucky to have parents who let her choose her career where she’ll be happy and stable, which is being a traveler. Prasanna finds learning fun, so she wants to continue learning simple things like cooking specific cuisine, scuba, and sky diving.

“High school has taught me about myself, and that is the most important lesson I could have learned. This metamorphosis has taken me from what I used to be to what I am now.”

In this essay, the writer shows the importance of self-discovery to become a better version of yourself. During their high school days, the author was a typically shy and somewhat childish person who was afraid to speak. So they hid in their room, where they felt safe. But as days pass and they grow older, the writer learns to be strong and stabilize their emotions. Soon, they left their cocoon, managed to express their feelings, and believed in themselves.

Because of self-discovery, the author realized they have their thoughts, ideas, morals, likes, and dislikes. They are no longer afraid of mistakes and have learned to enjoy life. The writer also believes that to succeed, and everyone must trust themselves and not give up on reaching their dreams.

“Bold, passionate, humble these are how I envision my hero to be and these are the three people I want to work on, moving forward as I strive to become the self I want to be in the future.”

The essay shows how a simple award speech by Matthew McConaughey moves the writer’s mind and ultimately creates their hero. They come up with three main qualities they want their future self to have. The first is to be someone who is not afraid to take advantage of any opportunities. Next is to stop being content with just being alive and continue searching for their purpose and genuine passion. Last, they strive to be humble and grateful to every person who contributes to their success.

“People with self-respect have the courage of accepting their mistakes. They exhibit certain toughness, a kind of moral courage, and they display character. Without self-respect, one becomes an unwilling audience of one’s failing both real and imaginary.”

Self-respect is a form of self-love. For Rane, it’s a habit of the mind that will never fail anyone. It’s a ritual that makes a person remember who they are. It reminds us to live without needing anyone else’s approval and walk alone toward our goals. Meanwhile, people with no self-respect hate those who have it. As a result, they become weak and lose their identity.

People can describe who you are in many ways, but the only person who truly knows you is yourself. Use this prompt to introduce yourself to the readers. Share personal and exciting details such as your name’s origin, quirky family routines, and your most memorable moments. It doesn’t have to be too personal. You only need to focus on information that distinguishes you from everyone else.

Personality is a person’s unique way of thinking, feeling, and behavior. You can apply this prompt to describe your personality as a student or working adult. Write about how you develop your skills, make friends, do everyday tasks, and many more. Differentiate “self” and “personality” in your introduction to help readers understand your essay content better.

Connect with your inner self and conduct a self-reflection. This practice helps us grow and improve. In writing this prompt, you will need time to reflect on your life to identify and explain your qualities and values. 

For instance, talk about the things you are grateful for, words that best describe you according to the people around you, and areas of yourself that you’d like to improve. Then, discuss how these things affect your life.

Every individual is a work in progress. Although you consider yourself a good person, there are still parts of you that you want to improve. Discuss these shortcomings with your readers. Expound on why people like and dislike these traits. Include how you plan to change your bad characteristics. You can add instances demonstrating your good and bad qualities to make your piece more relatable.

Writing about yourself is a great way to use your creativity in exploring and examining your identity. But, unfortunately, it’s also a great medium to release emotional distress and work through these feelings. So, for this prompt, delve into the benefits of writing about oneself. Then, persuade your readers to start writing about themselves and give tips to help them get started.

For help with this topic, read our guide explaining what is persuasive writing ?

If you want to connect emotionally with your readers, this prompt is the best to use for your essay. Identify and discuss difficult life experiences and explain how these challenging times helped you learn and grow as a person. 

Tip : You can use this prompt even if you haven’t faced any life-changing challenges. The problem you may have encountered can be as simple as finding it hard to wake up early.

Some benefits of self-awareness include being a better decision-maker and effective communicator. Define and explain self-awareness. Then, examine how self-awareness influences our lives. You can also include different types of self-awareness and their benefits to a person.

If you want to try these techniques, check out our round-up of the best journals !

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

“i” and “me”: the self in the context of consciousness.

• Cognition and Philosophy Lab, Department of Philosophy, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

James (1890) distinguished two understandings of the self, the self as “Me” and the self as “I”. This distinction has recently regained popularity in cognitive science, especially in the context of experimental studies on the underpinnings of the phenomenal self. The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and attempt to precisely distinguish between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. This distinction was originally based on the idea that the former (“Me”) corresponds to the self as an object of experience (self as object), while the latter (“I”) reflects the self as a subject of experience (self as subject). I will argue that in most of the cases (arguably all) this distinction maps onto the distinction between the phenomenal self (reflecting self-related content of consciousness) and the metaphysical self (representing the problem of subjectivity of all conscious experience), and as such these two issues should be investigated separately using fundamentally different methodologies. Moreover, by referring to Metzinger’s (2018) theory of phenomenal self-models, I will argue that what is usually investigated as the phenomenal-“I” [following understanding of self-as-subject introduced by Wittgenstein (1958) ] can be interpreted as object, rather than subject of experience, and as such can be understood as an element of the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model. This understanding relates to recent predictive coding and free energy theories of the self and bodily self discussed in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy.

Introduction

Almost 130 years ago, James (1890) introduced the distinction between “Me” and “I” (see Table 1 for illustrative quotes) to the debate about the self. The former term refers to understanding of the self as an object of experience, while the latter to the self as a subject of experience 1 . This distinction, in different forms, has recently regained popularity in cognitive science (e.g., Christoff et al., 2011 ; Liang, 2014 ; Sui and Gu, 2017 ; Truong and Todd, 2017 ) and provides a useful tool for clarifying what one means when one speaks about the self. However, its exact meaning varies in cognitive science, especially in regard to what one understands as the self as subject, or “I.”

TABLE 1. Quotes from James (1890) illustrating the distinction between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”) and a quote from Wittgenstein (1958) illustrating his distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject.

The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and take a closer look at the conceptual distinction between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. I will suggest, following James (1890) and in opposition to the tradition started by Wittgenstein (1958) , that in this context “Me” (i.e., the self as object) reflects the phenomenology of selfhood, and corresponds to what is also known as sense of self, self-consciousness, or phenomenal selfhood (e.g., Blanke and Metzinger, 2009 ; Blanke, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ). On the other hand, the ultimate meaning of “I” (i.e., the self as subject) is rooted in metaphysics of subjectivity, and refers to the question: why is all conscious experience subjective and who/what is the subject of conscious experience? I will argue that these two theoretical problems, i.e., phenomenology of selfhood and metaphysics of subjectivity, are in principle independent issues and should not be confused. However, cognitive science usually follows the Wittgensteinian tradition 2 by understanding the self-as-subject, or “I,” as a phenomenological, rather than metaphysical problem [Figure 1 illustrates the difference between James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) approach to the self]. By following Metzinger’s (2003 , 2010 ) framework of phenomenal self-models, and in agreement with a reductionist approach to the phenomenal “I” 3 ( Prinz, 2012 ), I will argue that what is typically investigated in cognitive science as the phenomenal “I” [or the Wittgenstein’s (1958) self-as-subject] can be understood as just a higher-order component of the self-model reflecting the phenomenal “Me.” Table 2 presents some of crucial claims of the theory of self-models, together with concise references to other theories of the self-as-object discussed in this paper.

FIGURE 1. An illustration of James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) distinctions between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”). In the original formulation, James’ (1890) “Me” includes also physical objects and people (material and social “Me”) – they were not included in the picture, because they are not directly related to consciousness.

TABLE 2. Examples of theories of the self-as-object (“Me”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the phenomenal self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

“Me” As An Object Of Experience: Phenomenology Of Self-Consciousness

The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE designations, meaning ALL THE THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain particular sort ( James, 1890 , p. 319, emphasis in original).

James (1890) chose the word “Me” to refer to self-as-object. What does it mean? In James’ (1890) view, it reflects “all the things” which have the power to produce “excitement of a certain particular sort.” This certain kind of excitement is nothing more than some form of experiential quality of me-ness, mine-ness, or similar - understood in a folk-theoretical way (this is an important point, because these terms have recently acquired technical meanings in philosophy, e.g., Zahavi, 2014 ; Guillot, 2017 ). What are “all the things”? The classic formulation suggests that James (1890) meant physical objects and cultural artifacts (material self), human beings (social self), and mental processes and content (spiritual self). These are all valid categories of self-as-object, however, for the purpose of this paper I will limit the scope of further discussion only to “objects” which are relevant when speaking about consciousness. Therefore, rather than speaking about, for example, my car or my body, I will discuss only their conscious representations. This limits the scope of self-as-object to one category of “things” – conscious mental content.

Let us now reformulate James’ (1890) idea in more contemporary terms and define “Me” as the totality of all content of consciousness that is experienced as self-related. Content of consciousness is meant here in a similar way to Chalmers (1996) , who begins “ The conscious mind ” by providing a list of different kinds of conscious content. He delivers an extensive (without claiming that exhaustive) collection of types of experiences, which includes the following 4 : visual; auditory; tactile; olfactory; experiences of hot and cold; pain; taste; other bodily experiences coming from proprioception, vestibular sense, and interoception (e.g., headache, hunger, orgasm); mental imagery; conscious thought; emotions. Chalmers (1996) also includes several other, which, however, reflect states of consciousness and not necessarily content per se , such as dreams, arousal, fatigue, intoxication, and altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive substances. What is common to all of the types of experience from the first list (conscious contents) is the fact that they are all, speaking in James’ (1890) terms, “objects” in a stream of consciousness: “all these things are objects, properly so called, to the subject that does the thinking” (p. 325).

The self understood as “Me” can be understood as a subset of a set of all these possible experiences. This subset is characterized by self-relatedness (Figure 2 ). It can be illustrated with sensory experiences. For example, in the visual domain, I experience an image of my face as different from another person’s face. Hence, while the image of my face belongs to “Me,” the image of someone else does not (although it can be experimentally manipulated, Tsakiris, 2008 ; Payne et al., 2017 ; Woźniak et al., 2018 ). The same can be said about my voice and sounds caused by me (as opposed to voices of other people), and about my smell. We also experience self-touch as different from touching or being touched by a different person ( Weiskrantz et al., 1971 ; Blakemore et al., 1998 ; Schutz-Bosbach et al., 2009 ). There is even evidence that we process our possessions differently ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ; Constable et al., 2018 ). This was anticipated by James’ (1890) notion of the material “Me,” and is typically regarded as reflecting one’s extended self ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ). In all of these cases, we can divide sensory experiences into the ones which do relate to the self and the ones which do not. The same can be said about the contents of thoughts and feelings, which can be either about “Me” or about something/someone else.

FIGURE 2. A simplified representation of a structure of phenomenal content including the metaphysical “I,” the phenomenal “Me,” and the phenomenal “I,” which can be understood (see in text) as a higher-level element of the phenomenal “Me.” Each pair of nodes connected with a yellow line represents one type of content of consciousness, with indigo nodes corresponding to self-related content, and black nodes corresponding to non-self-related content. In some cases (e.g., pain, emotions, interoceptive, and proprioceptive sensations), the black nodes are lighter and drawn with a dashed line (the same applies to links), to indicate that in normal circumstances one does not experiences these sensations as representing another person (although it is possible in thought experiments and pathologies). Multisensory/multimodal interactions have been omitted for the sake of clarity. All of the nodes compose the set of conscious thoughts, which can be formulated as “I experience X.” In normal circumstances, one does not deny ownership over these thoughts, however, in thought experiments, and in some cases of psychosis, one may experience that even such thoughts cease to feel as one’s own. This situation is represented by the shape with a dashed outline. Moreover, in special cases one can form meta-delusions, i.e., delusions about delusions – thoughts that my thoughts about other thoughts are not my thoughts (see text for description).

Characterizing self-as-object as a subset of conscious experiences specifies the building blocks of “Me” (which are contents of consciousness) and provides a guiding principle for distinguishing between self and non-self (self-relatedness). However, it is important to note two things. First, the distinction between self and non-self is often a matter of scale rather than a binary classification, and therefore self-relatedness may be better conceptualized as the strength of the relation with the self. It can be illustrated with an example of the “Inclusion of Other in Self” scale ( Aron et al., 1992 ). This scale asks to estimate to what extent another person feels related to one’s self, by choosing among a series of pairs of more-to-less overlapping circles representing the self and another person (e.g., a partner). The degree of overlap between the chosen pair of circles represents the degree of self-relatedness. Treating self-relatedness as a matter of scale adds an additional level of complexity to the analysis, and results in speaking about the extent to which a given content of consciousness represents self, rather than whether it simply does it or not. This does not, however, change the main point of the argument that we can classify all conscious contents according to whether (or to what extent, in that case) they are self-related. For the sake of clarity, I will continue to speak using the language of binary classification, but it should be kept in mind that it is an arbitrary simplification. The second point is that this approach to “Me” allows one to flexibly discuss subcategories of the self by imposing additional constraints on the type of conscious content that is taken into account, as well as the nature of self-relatedness (e.g., whether it is ownership of, agency over, authorship, etc.). For example, by limiting ourselves to discussing conscious content representing one’s body one can speak about the bodily self, and by imposing limits to conscious experience of one’s possessions one can speak about one’s extended self.

Keeping these reservations in mind two objections can be raised to the approach to “Me” introduced here. The first one is as follows:

(1) Speaking about the self/other distinction does not make sense in regard to experiences which are always “mine,” such as prioprioception or interoception. This special status may suggest that these modalities underpin the self as “I,” i.e., the subject of experience.

This idea is present in theoretical proposals postulating that subjectivity emerges based on (representations of) sensorimotor ( Gallagher, 2000 ; Christoff et al., 2011 ; Blanke et al., 2015 ) or interoceptive signals ( Damasio, 1999 ; Craig, 2010 ; Seth et al., 2011 ; Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 ; Salomon, 2017 ). There are two answers to this objection. First, the fact that this kind of experience (this kind of content of consciousness) is always felt as “my” experience simply means that all proprioceptive, interoceptive, pain experiences, etc., are as a matter of fact parts of “Me.” They are self-related contents of consciousness and hence naturally qualify as self-as-object. Furthermore, there is no principled reason why the fact that we normally do not experience them as belonging to someone else should transform them from objects of experience (content) into a subject of experience. Their special status may cause these experiences to be perceived as more central aspects of the self than experiences in other modalities, but there is no reason to think that it should change them from something that we experience into the self as an experiencer. Second, even the special status of these sensations can be called into question. It is possible to imagine a situation in which one experiences these kinds of sensations from an organ or a body which does not belong to her or him. We can imagine that with enough training one will learn to distinguish between proprioceptive signals coming from one’s body and those coming from another person’s (or artificial) body. If this is possible, then one may develop a phenomenal distinction between “my” versus “other’s” proprioceptive and interoceptive experiences (for example), and in this case the same rules of classification into phenomenal “Me” and phenomenal “not-Me” will apply as to other sensory modalities. This scenario is not realistic at the current point of technological development, but there are clinical examples which indirectly suggest that it may be possible. For example, people who underwent transplantation of an organ sometimes experience rejection of a transplant. Importantly, patients whose organisms reject an organ also more often experience psychological rejection of that transplant ( Látos et al., 2016 ). Moreover, there are rare cases in which patients following a successful surgery report that they perceive transplanted organs as foreign objects in themselves ( Goetzmann et al., 2009 ). In this case, affected people report experiencing a form of disownership of the implanted organ, suggesting that they may experience interoceptive signals coming from that transplant as having a phenomenal quality of being “not-mine,” leading to similar phenomenal quality as the one postulated in the before-mentioned thought experiment. Another example of a situation in which self-relatedness of interoception may be disrupted may be found in conjoint twins. In some variants of this developmental disorder (e.g., parapagus, dicephalus, thoracopagus) brains of two separate twins share some of the internal organs (and limbs), while others are duplicated and possessed by each twin individually ( Spencer, 2000 ; Kaufman, 2004 ). This provides an inverted situation to the one described in our hypothetical scenario – rather than two pieces of the same organ being “wired” to one person, the same organ (e.g., a heart, liver, stomach) is shared by two individuals. As such it may be simultaneously under control of two autonomous nervous systems. This situation raises challenging questions for theories which postulate that the root of self-as-subject lies in interoception. For example, if conjoint twins share the majority of internal organs, but possess mostly independent nervous systems, like dicephalus conjoint twins, then does it mean that they share the neural subjective frame ( Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 )? If the answer is yes, then does it mean that they share it numerically (both twins have one and the same subjective frame), or only qualitatively (their subjective frames are similar to the point of being identical, but they are distinct frames)? However, if interoception is just a part of “Me” then the answer becomes simple – the experiences can be only qualitatively identical, because they are experienced by two independent subjects.

All of these examples challenge the assumption that sensori-motor and interoceptive experiences are necessarily self-related and, as a consequence, that they can form the basis of self-as-subject. For this reason, it seems that signals coming from these modalities are more appropriate to underlie the phenomenal “Me,” for example in a form of background self-experience, or “phenomenal background” ( Dainton, 2008 , 2016 ), rather than the phenomenal “I.”

The second possible objection to the view of self-as-object described in this section is the following one:

(2) My thoughts and feelings may have different objects, but they are always my thoughts and feelings. Therefore, their object may be either “me” or “other,” but their subject is always “I.” As a consequence, even though my thoughts and feelings constitute contents of my consciousness, they underlie the phenomenal “I” and not the phenomenal “Me.”

It seems to be conceptually misguided to speak about one’s thoughts and feelings as belonging to someone else. This intuition motivated Wittgenstein (1958) to write: “there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache. To ask ‘are you sure it is you who have pains?’ “would be nonsensical” ( Wittgenstein, 1958 ). In the Blue Book, he introduced the distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject (see Table 1 for a full relevant quote) and suggested that while we can be wrong about the former, making a mistake about the latter is not possible. This idea was further developed by Shoemaker (1968) who introduced an arguably conceptual truth that we are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun, or IEM in short. For example, when I say “I see a photo of my face in front of me” I may be mistaken about the fact that it is my face (because, e.g., it is a photo of my identical twin), but I cannot be mistaken that it is me who is looking at it. One way to read IEM is that it postulates that I can be mistaken about self-as-object, but I cannot be mistaken about self-as-subject. If this is correct then there is a radical distinction between these two types of self that provides a strong argument to individuate them. From that point, one may argue that IEM provides a decisive argument to distinguish between phenomenal “I” (self-as-subject) and phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object).

Before endorsing this conclusion, let us take a small step back. It is important to note that in the famous passage from the Blue Book Wittgenstein (1958) did not write about two distinct types of self. Instead, he wrote about two ways of using the word “I” (or “my”). As such, he was more concerned with issues in philosophy of language than philosophy of mind. Therefore, a natural question arises – to what extent does this linguistic distinction map onto a substantial distinction between two different entities (types of self)? On the face of it, it seems that there is an important difference between these two uses of self-referential words, which can be mapped onto the experience of being a self-as-subject and the experience of being a self-as-object (or, for example, the distinction between bodily ownership and thought authorship, as suggested by Liang, 2014 ). However, I will argue that there are reasons to believe that the phenomenal “I,” i.e., the experience of being a self-as-subject may be better conceptualized as a higher-order phenomenal “Me” – a higher-level self-as-object.

Psychiatric practice provides cases of people, typically suffering from schizophrenia, who describe experiences of dispossession of thoughts, known as delusions of thought insertion ( Young, 2008 ; Bortolotti and Broome, 2009 ; Martin and Pacherie, 2013 ). According to the standard account, the phenomenon of thought insertion does not represent a disruption of sense of ownership over one’s thoughts, but only loss of sense of agency over them. However, the standard account has been criticized in recent years by theorists arguing that thought insertion indeed represents loss of sense of ownership ( Metzinger, 2003 ; Billon, 2013 ; Guillot, 2017 ; López-Silva, 2017 ). One of the main arguments against the standard view is that it runs into serious problems when attempting to explain obsessive intrusive thoughts in clinical population and spontaneous thoughts in healthy people. In both cases, subjects report lack of agency over thoughts, although they never claim lack of ownership over them, i.e., that these are not their thoughts. However, if the standard account is correct, obsessive thoughts should be experienced as belonging to someone else. The fact that they are not suggests that something else must be disrupted in delusions of thought insertion, i.e., sense of ownership 5 over them. If one can lose sense of ownership over one’s thoughts then it has important implications, because then one becomes capable of experiencing one’s thoughts “as someone else’s,” or at least “as not-mine.” However, when I experience my thoughts as not-mine I do it because I’ve taken a stance towards my thoughts, which treats them as an object of deliberation. In other words, I must have “objectified” them to experience that they have a quality of “feeling as if they are not mine.” Consequently, if I experience them as objects of experience, then they cannot form part of my self as subject of experience, because these two categories are mutually exclusive. Therefore, what seemed to constitute a phenomenal “I” turns out to be a part of thephenomenal “Me.”

If my thoughts do not constitute the “I” then how do they fit into the structure of “Me”? Previously, I asserted that thoughts with self-related content constitute “Me,” while thoughts with non-self related content do not. However, just now I argued in favor of the claim that all thoughts (including the ones with non-self-related content) that are experienced as “mine” belong to “Me.” How can one resolve this contradiction?

A way to address this reservation can be found in Metzinger’s (2003 ; 2010 ) self-model theory. Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ) argues that the experience of the self can be understood as underpinned by representational self-models. These self-models, however, are embedded in the hierarchical representational structure, as illustrated by an account of ego dissolution by Letheby and Gerrans (2017) :

Savage suggests that on LSD “[changes] in body ego feeling usually precede changes in mental ego feeling and sometimes are the only changes” (1955, 11), (…) This common temporal sequence, from blurring of body boundaries and loss of sense of ownership for body parts through to later loss of sense of ownership for thoughts, speaks further to the hierarchical architecture of the self-model. ( Letheby and Gerrans, 2017 , p. 8)

If self-models underlying the experience of self-as-object (“Me”) are hierarchical, then the apparent contradiction may be easily explained by the fact that when speaking about the content of thoughts and the thoughts themselves we are addressing self-models at two distinct levels. At the lower level we can distinguish between thoughts with self-related content and other-related content, while on the higher level we can distinguish between thoughts that feel “mine” as opposed to thoughts that are not experienced as “mine.” As a result, this thinking phenomenal “I” experienced in feeling of ownership over one’s thoughts may be conceived as just a higher-order level of Jamesian “Me.” As such, one may claim that there is no such thing as a phenomenal “I,” just multilevel phenomenal “Me.” However, an objection can be raised here. One may claim that even though a person with schizophrenic delusions experiences her thoughts as someone else’s (a demon’s or some malicious puppet master’s), she can still claim that:

Yes, “I” experience my thoughts as not mine, but as demon’s.” My thoughts feel as “not-mine,” however, it’s still me (or: “I”) who thinks of them as “not-mine.”

As such, one escapes “objectification” of “I” into “Me” by postulating a higher-level phenomenal-“I.” However, let us keep in mind that the thought written above constitutes a valid thought by itself. As such, this thought is vulnerable to the theoretical possibility that it turns into a delusion itself, once a psychotic person forms a meta-delusion (delusion about delusion). In this case, one may begin to experience that: “I” (I 1 ) experience that the “fake I” (I 2 ), who is a nasty pink demon, experiences my thoughts as not mine but as someone else’s (e.g., as nasty green demon’s). In this case, I may claim that the real phenomenal “I” is I 1 , since it is at the top of the hierarchy. However, one may repeat the operation of forming meta-delusions ad infinitum (as may happen in psychosis or drug-induced psychedelic states) effectively transforming each phenomenal “I” into another “fake-I” (and consequently making it a part of “Me”).

The possibility of meta-delusions illustrates that the phenomenal “I” understood as subjective thoughts is permanently vulnerable to the threat of losing the apparent subjective character and becoming an object of experience. As such it seems to be a poor choice for the locus of subjectivity, since it needs to be constantly “on the run” from becoming treated as an object of experience, not only in people with psychosis, but also in all psychologically healthy individuals if they decide to reflect on their thoughts. Therefore, it seems more likely that the thoughts themselves cannot constitute the subject of experience. However, even in case of meta-delusions there seems to be a stable deeper-level subjectivity, let us call it the deep “I,” which is preserved, at least until one loses consciousness. After all, a person who experiences meta-delusions would be constantly (painfully) aware of the process, and often would even report it afterwards. This deep “I” cannot be a special form of content in the stream of consciousness, because otherwise it would be vulnerable to becoming a part of “Me.” Therefore, it must be something different.

There seem to be two places where one can look for this deep “I”: in the domain of phenomenology or metaphysics. The first approach has been taken by ( Zahavi and Kriegel, 2016 ) who argue that “all conscious states’ phenomenal character involves for-me-ness as an experiential constituent.” It means that even if we rule out everything else (e.g., bodily experiences, conscious thoughts), we are still left with some form of irreducible phenomenal self-experience. This for-me-ness is not a specific content of consciousness, but rather “refers to the distinct manner, or how , of experiencing” ( Zahavi, 2014 ).

This approach, however, may seem inflationary and not satisfying (e.g., Dainton, 2016 ). One reason for this is that it introduces an additional phenomenal dimension, which may lead to uncomfortable consequences. For example, a question arises whether for-me-ness can ever be lost or replaced with the “ how of experiencing” of another person. For example, can I experience my sister’s for-me-ness in my stream of consciousness? If yes, then how is for-me-ness different from any other content of consciousness? And if the answer is no, then how is it possible to distil the phenomenology of for-me-ness from the metaphysical fact that a given stream of consciousness is always experienced by this and not other subject?

An alternative approach to the problem of the deep “I” is to reject that the subject of experience, the “I,” is present in phenomenology (like Hume, 1739/2000 ; Prinz, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ), and look for it somewhere else, in the domain of metaphysics. Although James (1890) did not explicitly formulate the distinction between “Me” and “I” as the distinction between the phenomenal and the metaphysical self, he hinted at it at several points, for example when he concluded the Chapter on the self with the following fragment: “(...) a postulate, an assertion that there must be a knower correlative to all this known ; and the problem who that knower is would have become a metaphysical problem” ( James, 1890 , p. 401).

“I” As A Subject Of Experience: Metaphysics Of Subjectivity

Thoughts which we actually know to exist do not fly about loose, but seem each to belong to some one thinker and not to another ( James, 1890 , pp. 330–331).

Let us assume that phenomenal consciousness exists in nature, and that it is a part of the reality we live in. The problem of “I” emerges once we realize that one of the fundamental characteristics of phenomenal consciousness is that it is always subjective, that there always seems to be some subject of experience. It seems mistaken to conceive of consciousness which do “fly about loose,” devoid of subjective character, devoid of being someone’s or something’s consciousness. Moreover, it seems that subjectivity may be one of the fundamental inherent properties of conscious experience (similar notions can be found in: Berkeley, 1713/2012 ; Strawson, 2003 ; Searle, 2005 ; Dainton, 2016 ). It seems highly unlikely, if not self-contradictory, that there exists something like an objective conscious experience of “what it is like to be a bat” ( Nagel, 1974 ), which is not subjective in any way. This leads to the metaphysical problem of the self: why is all conscious experience subjective, and what or who is the subject of this experience? Let us call it the problem of the metaphysical “I,” as contrasted with the problem of the phenomenal “I” (i.e., is there a distinctive experience of being a self as a subject of experience, and if so, then what is this experience?), which we discussed so far.

The existence of the metaphysical “I” does not entail the existence of the phenomenal self. It is possible to imagine a creature that possesses a metaphysical “I,” but does not possess any sense of self. In such a case, the creature would possess consciousness, although it would not experience anything as “me,” nor entertain any thoughts/feelings, etc., as “I.” In other words, it is a possibility that one may not experience self-related content of consciousness, while being a sentient being. One example of such situation may be the experience of a dreamless sleep, which “is characterized by a dissolution of subject-object duality, or (…) by a breakdown of even the most basic form of the self-other distinction” ( Windt, 2015 ). This is a situation which can be regarded as an instance of the state of minimal phenomenal experience – the simplest form of conscious experience possible ( Windt, 2015 ; Metzinger, 2018 ), in which there is no place for even the most rudimentary form of “Me.” Another example may be the phenomenology of systems with grid-like architectures which, according to the integrated information theory (IIT, Tononi et al., 2016 ), possess conscious experience 6 . If IIT is correct, then these systems experience some form of conscious states, which most likely lack any phenomenal distinction between “Me” and “not-Me.” However, because they may possess a stream of conscious experience, and conscious experience is necessarily subjective, there remains a valid question: who or what is the subject of that experience?

The question of what exactly is the metaphysical subject of experience can have different answers. There has been a long history of theories of the self ( Barresi and Martin, 2011 ) and some of them directly address this issue. Platonic or Cartesian notions of the soul are good examples of an approach providing one answer to this question: conscious experience is subjective, because there exists a non-material being (self, soul) which is the subject of this experience (see Table 3 ). Other solutions tend to either define the self in less metaphysically expensive ways ( Johnston, 1987 ; Strawson, 2000 ; Dainton, 2008 ), define it as a formal feature of consciousness ( Searle, 2005 ), or deny the need to postulate its existence ( Metzinger, 2003 ). What is crucial here, however, is that the problem of the metaphysical self is a different issue and requires a different methodology, than the problem of the phenomenal self.

TABLE 3. Examples of theories of the self-as-subject (“I”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the metaphysical self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

What sort of methodology, then, is appropriate for investigating the metaphysical self? It seems that the most relevant methods come from the toolbox of metaphysics. This toolbox includes classical philosophical methods such as thought experiments and logical analysis. However, methodology of metaphysics is an area of open discussion, and at present there are no signs of general consensus. One of the most debated issues in this field, which is especially relevant here, is to what extent the methodology of metaphysics is continuous with the methodology of natural sciences (see Tahko, 2015 , Chapter 9 for an overview). The positions span the spectrum between the claim that science and metaphysics are fully autonomous on the one side and the claim that metaphysics can be fully naturalized on the other. Discussing this issue goes way beyond the scope of this paper. However, if these two areas are at least to some extent related (i.e., not fully autonomous), then one may argue that scientific methods can be at least of some relevance in metaphysics and consequently for investigations of the metaphysical “I.”

One example in which empirical results seem to be able to influence theoretical investigations of the metaphysical self is through imposing constraints on philosophical theories. For example, because the metaphysical self is inherently related to consciousness, we should expect that different theories of consciousness should place different constraints on what a metaphysical self can be. Then, if one theory of consciousness acquires stronger empirical support than the others, we can also treat this as evidence for the constraints on the self that this theory implies.

Let us look at an example of IIT to illustrate this point. According to IIT ( Oizumi et al., 2014 ; Tononi et al., 2016 ) the content of conscious experience is defined by the so-called informational “complex” which is characterized by maximally integrated information (which can be measured by calculating the value of Φ max ). This complex then defines the stream of conscious experience. However, what happens if there is more than one such complex in one person? In this case, as Tononi et al. (2016) wrote:

According to IIT, two or more non-overlapping complexes may coexist as discrete physical substrates of consciousness (PSCs) within a single brain, each with its own definite borders and value of Φ max . The complex that specifies a person’s day to day stream of consciousness should have the highest value of Φ max – that is, it should be the “major” complex. In some conditions, for example, after a split-brain operation, the major complex may split. In such instances, one consciousness, supported by a complex in the dominant hemisphere and with privileged access to Broca’s area, would be able to speak about the experience, but would remain unaware of the presence of another consciousness, supported by a complex in the other hemisphere, which can be revealed by carefully designed experiments. ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

This fragment suggests that in IIT the metaphysical “I” can be understood as tied to a complex of maximally integrated information. In this case, a split-brain patient would possess two metaphysical selves, because as a consequence of an operation her or his brain hosts two such complexes. On the face of it, it seems to be a plausible situation ( cf. Bayne, 2010 ). However, in the sentence which immediately follows, Tononi et al. (2016) suggest that:

An intriguing possibility is that splitting of the PSC may also occur in healthy people during long-lasting dual-task conditions – for example, when driving in an auto-pilot like manner on a familiar road while listening to an engaging conversation ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

The implications of this possibility are much more severe, because it postulates that in a matter of minutes or seconds a complex can dynamically divide into several complexes, and individual complexes can merge into one major complex. How do the complexes understood in this way then relate to the metaphysical “I”? Unfortunately, IIT is silent about this issue, but there seem to be at least two responses to this question. First, one may argue that the self does not need to be limited to one complex, but that the same metaphysical “I” can be present in all of the simultaneous streams of consciousness (complexes). However, this solution is at odds with both common-sense intuition and IIT itself. It would presuppose not only an extremely disunified view of consciousness, but even lead to self-contradictory consequences. The metaphysical “I” can be thought of as the metaphysical fact that any given stream of consciousness is subjectively experienced by some “self” (regardless of what that self might be). However, in a disunified view of an organism’s consciousness this metaphysical “I” would at the same time a) be the subject of experience of all of the complexes within this organism, and b) be the subject of experience of only one of these complexes while being blind to the others (as claimed by IIT: two complexes are not “co-conscious” with each other). It presents a contradiction and strongly suggests that the metaphysical “I” cannot be underpinned by multiple independent complexes. It leaves us with the second option, which is to bite the bullet and accept that IIT implies that the metaphysical “I” persists either as long as a given complex, or for an even shorter period of time, for example for just up to a few seconds, as suggested by Strawson (2000 , 2010 ). It means that if IIT (and the analysis outlined above) is correct then the metaphysical “I” turns out to be radically different from our intuitive understanding of subject-of-experience as persisting continuously life-long stream of consciousness. However, if empirical evidence in support of the current version of IIT becomes strong enough, it may suggest that our common-sense intuitions about self-as-subject may be mistaken. On the other hand, different theories of phenomenal consciousness (and even different versions of IIT) may imply different constraints on the metaphysical “I,” and the extent to which they are supported by empirical evidence may suggest a way to say something about what the subject of conscious experience is.

Overall, assuming that metaphysics is not fully independent from science, the relevant methodology for investigating the metaphysical “I” is a combination of toolboxes of metaphysics and empirical science. This contrasts with the phenomenal “Me,” where the relevant toolkit includes methods from phenomenology and science. The second point, which has been illustrated with an example of IIT, is that it is important to explicitly spell out the implications of different theories of consciousness in regard to what is the subject of conscious experience, as it may provide the best way forward towards solving this issue.

Understanding Predictive Coding Theories Of The Self

Recently, there has been a huge number of attempts to explain the self through the framework of predictive coding (PC) and the free energy principle (FEP). In this final section of the paper, I will use PC theories of the self as a working example demonstrating practical consequences of implementing the Jamesian distinction between “Me” and “I.” I will suggest that PC theories of the self target different dimensions of self-as-object, understood as a hierarchical structure of self-models ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2010 ), and as such provide a valuable framework to understand the self. However, I will also explain why PC and the FEP do not allow us to say much about self-as-subject (the metaphysical “I”).

According to PC, the brain can be understood as an inference machine which hosts and continuously updates a probabilistic model of the world, which it uses to infer hidden causes behind the sensory data (for a more detailed introduction see: Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 , 2010 ; Friston and Kiebel, 2009 ; Hohwy, 2013 ; Clark, 2016 ). It accomplishes this by continuously issuing predictions and comparing them with sensory data, with the discrepancy between predictions and data being propagated further up the hierarchy as prediction errors. As such, PC postulates that the brain can be seen as a hierarchical structure of generative models (which are responsible for issuing predictions). Prediction errors which arise at lower levels serve as data to be compared with predictions at the higher levels. This view of the mind inverts the classical feedforward view in which perception is a predominantly bottom-up process. In PC, instead, perception is mostly driven by top-down predictions, with bottom-up prediction errors serving the function of feedback helping to choose model with the most explanatory power. Moreover, in an extension of PC, which is known as active inference, action is also understood as a way of maximizing the fit of one’s internal models to reality. The main idea behind active inference is that rather than changing the model in order to better fit the data, one can act on the world and change it according to predictions issued by the currently dominating model. As a consequence, the whole perception-action cycle can be understood as driven by one overarching goal, i.e., long-term minimization of prediction errors.

The FEP is a further generalization of PC. It postulates that all living organisms operate under the principle to minimize the so-called “variational free energy,” which is an information theoretical measure which roughly can be understood as a measure of uncertainty ( Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 ). One of the main claims of this theory is that organisms which act according to FEP (i.e., they act in a way to minimize free energy in the long term) will, in effect, implicitly approximate Bayesian inference. It means that they will combine their prior knowledge (represented by their model of the world) with the incoming sensory input in a mathematically optimal way.

Both PC and the FEP have recently gained huge popularity and motivated a number of theories attempting to explain various aspects of cognition within this framework. It includes numerous attempts to understand different facets of the self, such as sense of bodily ownership ( Apps and Tsakiris, 2014 ), sense of self in agency and perception ( Hohwy, 2007 ), the influence of interoception on self-consciousness ( Seth et al., 2011 ; Seth, 2013 ), social aspects of the self ( Moutoussis et al., 2014 ; Friston and Frith, 2015 ), the relationship with minimal phenomenal selfhood ( Limanowski and Blankenburg, 2013 ), and even psychodynamical interpretations of the self ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ; Fotopoulou, 2012 ). The most comprehensive treatment of the self from the PC perspective ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 ) also exemplifies most of the crucial points made by other PC theories of the self. At the beginning of their paper Hohwy and Michael (2017) describe the self in the following words:

We use a general computational framework for brain function to develop a theory of the self. The theory is that the self is an inferred model of endogenous, deeply hidden causes of behavior. (…) we discuss why such a set of hidden endogenous causes should qualify as a self. ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 , p. 363)

The self, as seen from this perspective, is essentially a hierarchical model of endogenous hidden causes of sensory input. Or, in more classical terms, it can be said that it is a hierarchical representational structure ( cf. Clark, 2016 ; Williams, 2017 ) which allows one to distinguish between endogenous causes (what is caused by me) and exogenous causes (what is caused by something else). This distinction can be illustrated with an example of a comparison between seeing a movement of my virtual hand and of a virtual hand of someone else. If adequately prepared, in both cases the image of a hand and its movement may be identical. However, in one case I can realize that the movement of the hand is congruent with my intentions (manifested through my actions performed using a computer controller) and, as a consequence, infer that the cause of the hand’s movement is me. On the other hand, I may fail to notice any congruence between my intentions and the movement and hence infer that the hidden cause behind the movement I observe is some other person. According to Hohwy and Michael (2017) , the self is just a set of such hidden endogenous causes. Although not necessarily in full agreement with this picture in regard to the details, all other PC theories of the self listed above also speak about the self as underpinned by hierarchy of generative models, which are preoccupied with conducting probabilistic inference aimed to infer hidden causes of observed data patterns. This inference is then postulated to underlie specific types of conscious self-experience, i.e., different facets of the sense of self.

As such, one common theme among all PC theories of the self is the following: aspects of conscious experience of the self are underpinned by a representational structure in the form of hierarchical generative models. In its core, it is the same idea as the one introduced earlier by Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ), i.e., that our phenomenal experience of the self is underpinned by a representational structure of unconscious self-models (see also: Crane, 2003 ; Chalmers, 2004 , for a discussion about the relationship between representational and conscious content). Once an unconscious self-model enters conscious awareness, it generates a corresponding self-related conscious content (see: Metzinger, 2006 , 2014 , for an explicit distinction between the levels of representations and conscious content in regard to the bodily self). The same mechanism is at work in PC theories – the dynamic process of model selection leads to suppression of some models but allows other models to enter awareness in the form of conscious content. This mechanism allows PC to explain self-related content of consciousness, which is essentially nothing else than the James’ (1890) self-as-object of experience. This is how PC and the FEP help to understand the phenomenal “Me” – by describing the structure and dynamics of the underlying representational architecture.

To what extent PC and FEP can provide us with any help when confronted with the task to explain the metaphysical “I”? Here, I will argue that in contrast to the phenomenal “Me,” the issues pertaining to the metaphysical “I” are outside of its reach. The reason for this is a consequence of the fact that PC is in principle agnostic in regard to the issue of what brings representational content into the scope of conscious experience. In general, this can be regarded as an advantage, because this way PC accounts of self-experience can avoid the burden of being hostage to any specific theory of consciousness, and stay in principle compatible with most of them (e.g., see Hohwy, 2013 , Chapter 10 for an attempt to combine PC with ideas from Global Neuronal Workspace theory: Dehaene and Changeux, 2011 ; Dehaene, 2014 ). However, it also makes PC fundamentally underspecified when treated as a theory which is used to explain issues related to consciousness. While, as suggested before, PC is a valuable framework to describe the representational structure underlying conscious content, it runs into problems when used to explain why certain content is conscious in the first place. One way in which PC and FEP can attempt to retain relevance is by aiming to explain access consciousness ( Block, 1995 ) – a functional mechanism which allows that “some of the attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others” ( Dehaene, 2014 ). However, the problem of the metaphysical “I” becomes a relevant issue only when approached in the context of phenomenal consciousness – the type of consciousness which is loaded with the burden of the so-called “hard problem” ( Chalmers, 1996 ).

This is where PS and FEP encounter a dead end, as the problem enters the area which belongs more to metaphysics than empirical science (at least in the light of the current state of affairs). In order to provide an account of the metaphysical self, one needs to begin with at least some form of a theory of phenomenal consciousness and its place in physical reality. At present FEP (and PC) does not provide such a theory. Recently, Friston (2018) suggested that FEP can be used to understand consciousness, although the fact that he discusses consciousness in functionalist terms (consciousness is related to counterfactual inference 7 ) suggests that his proposal aims to explain access consciousness, making it irrelevant for the problem of metaphysical “I.”

To summarize, the fact that PC and the FEP are not theories of phenomenal consciousness, and seem not to impose any constraints on these theories, has important consequences for what type of self they can explain. As I argued, they have the potential to substantially contribute to the issue of different levels of the phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object) by describing the structure and dynamics of the level of representational content, which are reflected at the level of conscious experience. However, they are not suited to explain the metaphysical “I” (self-as-subject) because they do not address the issue of the place of consciousness in nature. Hence, the main claim is that while PC can be seen as a useful framework to investigate phenomenology of “Me,” it is in principle unsuitable to provide answers to questions about the metaphysics of “I.”

I placed the debate of the self in the domain of consciousness (as opposed to the self understood as e.g., a representational structure, a physical object, or a spiritual entity) and argued that (1) conceptually, the distinction between “Me” and “I” may reflect the distinction between theoretical problems of the phenomenal self and the metaphysical self, respectively (although the notion of for-me-ness may complicate this picture), and (2) that what is described in the literature as the phenomenal “I” can be regarded as just a higher-level part of the phenomenal “Me” [which can be understood as Metzinger’s (2018) phenomenal self-model].

The first claim draws attention to the distinction between “I” and “Me,” which suggests that these two theoretical issues should be investigated independently, using two different methodologies. While “Me” can be investigated using phenomenology and scientific methodology, “I” is typically a metaphysical problem (perhaps with the exception of non-deflationary understandings of for-me-ness) and it is arguable to what extent it can be approached using standard scientific methods. Therefore, it is important to clearly state which problem one approaches when discussing the self in the context of consciousness (see Tables 2 , 3 for some examples).

The second claim, the postulate to treat what is usually described as phenomenal “I” as just a part of the phenomenal “Me,” has two implications. The first is constructive. Investigating issues which are typically regarded in cognitive science as “I” from the perspective of “Me” may contribute towards better understanding of self-consciousness by emphasizing that these two research areas may have much more in common than it appears. Rather than using two distinct terms, which suggest that we are dealing with two fundamentally different problems, we may approach them as just two facets of the same multidimensional research problem. One such approach is to treat both of them as just different levels in the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2009 , 2010 ), an approach which can be (and implicitly is) shared by recent theories of the self, especially within the framework of PC.

The second implication is pragmatic. Refraining from using the term “I” when speaking in the context of phenomenology and using it only in the metaphysical context may reduce conceptual confusion in regard to this term. However, it will also mean forfeiting an important distinction (“Me” versus “I”) which has already gained traction in cognitive science. As such, the choice to eliminate the term “I” in the context of phenomenology is a repelling option, but may be beneficial in the long term. Alternatively, one may use more specific terms, such as “sense of ownership over an experience” to reflect what is meant by “I” in the Wittgensteinian tradition, or, e.g., “sense of ownership of interoceptive signals” when discussing the role of interoception. A second option may be to recast the distinction used in cognitive science in different terms. One proposal is to explicitly speak about it as the distinction between the experience/sense of “Me” versus the experience/sense of “I” (rather than just “Me” and “I”). The task here would be, however, to prove that there is a qualitative difference between them, and to demarcate the exact border.

Author Contributions

The article has been solely the work of MW.

This article was supported by the Australian Research Council Grant No. DP160102770.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jakob Hohwy, Tim Bayne, Jennifer Windt, Monima Chadha, and the members of Cognition and Philosophy Lab at Monash University (especially Julian Matthews) for discussions about the issues described in the paper. The author also wants to thank the reviewers and the editor for helpful comments on how to improve the manuscript.

• ^ Therefore, whenever I use the term “I” I mean self-as-subject (of experience), and whenever I use the term “Me” I mean self-as-object (of experience). This assumption reflects James’ (1890) understanding of these terms (see Table 1 ). I also assume, following James (1890) , that these two categories are mutually exclusive, i.e., if something is an object of experience then it cannot simultaneously be a subject of experience, and vice versa.
• ^ Wittgenstein (1958) himself did not discuss the issue of phenomenology of the self. However, his approach to the distinction between the use of “I” as subject and “I” as object can be seen as a starting point for contemporary discussions of phenomenology of the self-as-subject.
• ^ Whenever I use the prefix “phenomenal” I mean “the conscious experience of.” For example, when I write phenomenal “I”, I mean: the conscious experience of self as subject of experience (“I”). In a similar fashion I use the prefix “metaphysical” when I mean “the metaphysical entity of.”
• ^ Chalmers (1996) also lists “sense of self,” although it is highly controversial whether it can be treated as a distinctive type of conscious content.
• ^ Sometimes referred to as sense of authorship.
• ^ “IIT allows for certain simple systems such as grid-like architectures, similar to topographically organized areas in the human posterior cortex, to be highly conscious even when not engaging in any intelligent behavior” ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 460).
• ^ For example, he writes: “So where does consciousness emerge? The proposal offered here is that conscious processing has a temporal thickness or depth, which underwrites inferences about the consequences of action. This necessarily lends inference a purposeful and self-evidencing aspect that has the hallmarks of consciousness” ( Friston, 2018 , p. 1).

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Keywords : self, consciousness, self-consciousness, sense of self, self-as-subject, self-as-object, predictive coding, IIT

Citation: Woźniak M (2018) “I” and “Me”: The Self in the Context of Consciousness. Front. Psychol. 9:1656. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01656

Received: 20 March 2018; Accepted: 17 August 2018; Published: 04 September 2018.

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Copyright © 2018 Woźniak. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Mateusz Woźniak, [email protected] ; [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Thomas Aquinas – Toward a Deeper Sense of Self

Therese scarpelli cory.

“Who am I?” If Google’s autocomplete is any indication, it’s not one of the questions we commonly ask online (unlike other existential questions like “What is the meaning of life?” or “What is a human?”). But philosophers have long held that “Who am I?” is in some way the central question of human life. “Know yourself” was the inscription that the ancient Greeks inscribed over the threshold to the Delphic temple of Apollo, the god of wisdom. In fact, self-knowledge is the gateway to wisdom, as Socrates quipped: “The wise person is the one who knows what he doesn’t know.”

Thomas Aquinas

The reality is, we all lack self-knowledge to some degree, and the pursuit of self-knowledge is a lifelong quest—often a painful one. For instance, a common phenomenon studied in psychology is the “ loss of a sense of self ” that occurs when a familiar way of thinking about oneself (for example, as “a healthy person,” “someone who earns a good wage,” “a parent”) is suddenly stripped away by a major life change or tragedy.  Forced to face oneself for the first time without these protective labels, one can feel as though the ground has been suddenly cut out from under one’s feet: Who am I, really?

But the reality of self-ignorance is something of a philosophical puzzle.  Why do we need to work at gaining knowledge about ourselves?  In other cases, ignorance results from a lack of experience.  No surprise that I confuse kangaroos with wallabies: I’ve never seen either in real life.  Of course I don’t know what number you’re thinking about: I can’t see inside your mind.  But what excuse do I have for being ignorant of anything having to do with myself?  I already am myself !  I, and I alone, can experience my own mind from the inside.  This insider knowledge makes me—as communications specialists are constantly reminding us—the unchallenged authority on “what I feel” or “what I think.”  So why is it a lifelong project for me to gain insight into my own thoughts, habits, impulses, reasons for acting, or the nature of the mind itself?

This is called the “problem of self-opacity,” and we’re not the only ones to puzzle over it: It was also of great interest to the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), whose theory of self-knowledge is documented in my new book Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge .  It’s a common scholarly myth that early modern philosophers (starting with Descartes) invented the idea of the human being as a “self” or “subject.”  My book tries to dispel that myth, showing that like philosophers and neuroscientists today, medieval thinkers were just as curious about why the mind is so intimately familiar, and yet so inaccessible, to itself.  (In fact, long before Freud, medieval Latin and Islamic thinkers were speculating about a subconscious, inaccessible realm in the mind.)  The more we study the medieval period, the clearer it becomes that inquiry into the self does not start with Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.”  Rather, Descartes was taking sides in a debate about self-knowledge that had already begun in the thirteenth century and earlier.

For Aquinas, we don’t encounter ourselves as isolated minds or selves, but rather always as agents interacting with our environment.

Aquinas begins his theory of self-knowledge from the claim that all our self-knowledge is dependent on our experience of the world around us.  He rejects a view that was popular at the time, i.e., that the mind is “always on,” never sleeping, subconsciously self-aware in the background.  Instead, Aquinas argues, our awareness of ourselves is triggered and shaped by our experiences of objects in our environment .   He pictures the mind as as a sort of undetermined mental “putty” that takes shape when it is activated in knowing something.  By itself, the mind is dark and formless; but in the moment of acting, it is “lit up” to itself from the inside and sees itself engaged in that act.  In other words, when I long for a cup of mid-afternoon coffee, I’m not just aware of the coffee, but of myself as the one wanting it .  So for Aquinas, we don’t encounter ourselves as isolated minds or selves, but rather always as agents interacting with our environment.  That’s why the labels we apply to ourselves—“a gardener,” “a patient person,” or “a coffee-lover”—are always taken from what we do or feel or think toward other things.

The Temple of Apollo at Delphi, © 2004 David Monniaux

But if we “see” ourselves from the inside at the moment of acting, what about the “problem of self-opacity” mentioned above?  Instead of lacking self-knowledge, shouldn’t we be able to “see” everything about ourselves clearly?  Aquinas’s answer is that just because we experience something doesn’t mean we instantly understand everything about it—or to use his terminology: experiencing that something exists doesn’t tell us what it is . (By comparison: If someday I encounter a wallaby, that won’t make me an expert about wallabies.)  Learning about a thing’s nature requires a long process of gathering evidence and drawing conclusions, and even then we may never fully understand it.  The same applies to the mind.  I am absolutely certain, with an insider’s perspective that no one else can have, of the reality of my experience of wanting another cup of coffee.  But the significance of those experiences—what they are, what they tell me about myself and the nature of the mind—requires further experience and reasoning.  Am I hooked on caffeine?  What is a “desire” and why do we have desires?  These questions can only be answered by reasoning about the evidence taken from many experiences.

Aquinas, then, would surely approve that we’re not drawn to search online for answers to the question, “Who am I?”  That question can only be answered “from the inside” by me , the one asking the question.  At the same time, answering this question isn’t a matter of withdrawing from the world and turning in on ourselves.  It’s a matter of becoming more aware of ourselves at the moment of engaging with reality, and drawing conclusions about what our activities towards other things “say” about us.  There’s Aquinas’s “prescription” for a deeper sense of self.

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Therese Scarpelli Cory is the author of Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge. She is assistant professor of philosophy at Seattle University....

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Contemporary Self-Understanding Essay (Critical Writing)

The readings on self-understanding provide valuable insights that allow for better clarifying the components and factors that shape the self. For example, the concept of the enterprise culture implies that the successful existence of social and political areas is achieved through the efforts of organizations, businesses, and people. However, it is largely perceived that bureaucracy and centralized planning serve as the key factors, which is erroneous, as stated by Hayek and Friedman (Rose, 1996). In other words, the enterprising activities, where the mentioned actors try to acquire personal benefits by creating new projects, lead to the common well-being. The issue that is problematized in this connection is the way organizations are governed and how they should manage themselves. It is considered that the enterprise has the active and calculating selves, where the former is a governing side, and the latter is responsible for acting and improving itself.

The discussion of a therapeutic culture of self is another perspective that is linked to political transformations. Namely, Rose (1996) assumes that the rise of capitalism over individualism promoted the increased need for the therapy, which is associated with self-sufficiency tendencies. The reduced roles of family and religion lead to the obsession with therapy as a set of new techniques to balance their selves and the inner world. Rose (1996) also states that self-help becomes one of the central concepts that explain the personal existence and regulation of an individual. Although it was considered that the political and social regulation matter, it becomes evident that self-help is a combination of professional help and the effort of a person seeking to ensure a better quality of life and meet social norms. The role of a psychologist is to provide the answers to the questions of clients, who try to understand and archive success, normality, and concealment (Cushman, 1990). Accordingly, the presuppositions of the self should be taken into account as the expertise of subjectivity while providing the therapy.

Further discussions of the human nature show that scholars are likely to view the self as a form that is impacted by a set of social, religious, political, and economic relations. In addition, the self is shaped under the impact of the enduring importance of these relations, as well as the practical conduct of a person (Rose, 1996). The latter compose the subjectivity, and Cushman (1990) claims that the life-style solution depends on the ability of a psychotherapist to offer corrective emotional experience, which is linked to the self. Cushman (1990) pays particular attention to the historical changes of the self. For example, it was sexually- restricted in the Victorian era, but become empty and filled with food and celebrities in today’s reality. The way of economy, namely, great production and excessive consumption promotion, significantly impacted the emergence of the contemporary empty self.

The fact that the modern self is shaped in a disquieting manner is identified as disappointing. Even though the modern self is informed by ethics, it still struggles to conduct appropriately, avoiding and preventing conflicts and misunderstanding. In this case, psychotherapy can serve as a strong power to apply and address the current challenges (Cushman, 1990). It is assumed that there is a need to rethink the system, focusing on the impact of social, economic, and political factors on the self to adjust the ways to help clients in seeking a higher life quality.

Cushman, P. (1990). Why the self is empty: Toward a historically situated psychology. American Psychologist, 45(5) , 599-611.

Rose, N. (1996). Governing enterprising individuals. In Inventing our selves: Psychology, power and personhood (pp. 150-168). Cambridge University Press.

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What Is the Self?

You are a system of social, psychological, neural, and molecular mechanisms..

Posted June 23, 2014 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

Philosophers, psychologists, and ordinary people are all interested in one pressing question: Who are you?

The traditional philosophical answer, found in the writings of Plato, Kant, and many religious thinkers, is that the self is an immortal soul that transcends the physical being. However, some philosophers who don't subscribe to this metaphysical view have swung in the other direction and rejected the idea of the self altogether. David Hume, for instance, said that the self is nothing more than a bundle of perceptions, and Daniel Dennett dismissed the self as merely a “center of negative gravity."

In contrast, many psychologists have taken the self very seriously, and discussed at length a huge number of important phenomena surrounding it—including self- identity , self-esteem , self-regulation , and self-improvement. Is it possible to have a psychologically interesting view of the self that is also consistent with the scientific understanding of minds and brains?

In a new article , I argue that the self is a complex system operating at four different levels. To explain more than 80 phenomena about the self, we need to look at several mechanisms (interacting parts) working in tandem: molecular, neural , psychological, and social.

Most familiar is the psychological level, where we can talk about self-concepts that people apply to themselves—for example, thinking of themselves as being extroverted or introverted, conscientious or irresponsible, and the like. Self-concepts also include other dimensions such as gender , ethnicity , and nationality.

The psychological level is important, but a deeper understanding requires us to also consider both the neural and the molecular levels. At the neural level, we can think of each of these psychological concepts as patterns of firing occurring within groups of neurons. A sufficiently complex account of neural representations can explain how it is that people apply concepts to themselves and others and also use them for explanatory purposes. We use concepts not only to categorize people but also to explain their behaviors—for example, saying that someone did not go to a party (behavior) because they are an introvert (category).

Moving down another level, we can look at the relevance of molecular mechanisms to understand what makes people who they are. Personality and physical makeup are affected by genetics as well as epigenetics , or changes to inherited genes that are mediated by chemical attachments that can go back one or more generations. Evidence is mounting that both epigenetics and genetics are important for explaining various aspects of personality and mental illness.

Finally, at the molecular level, understanding why people are who they are requires looking at ways in which neural operations depend on molecular processes, such as the operations of neurotransmitters and hormones .

My new account of the self might sound ruthlessly reductionist, captured by some inane slogan like “you are your genes.” But in keeping with much contemporary work in social psychology, I think it's also important to appreciate the role of social mechanisms in making you who you are. Your self-concepts and behaviors all depend, in part, on the interactions you have with other people, including the ones who influence you and the ones from whom you want to differentiate yourself.

Experiments in social psychology have established that behavior depends not only on innate and learned factors, but also on situations—including people's expectations about what other people are going to do. Therefore, we need to understand selves as operating at a social level, in addition to psychological, neural, and molecular levels. As Hazel Rose Marcus says, "You can’t be a self by yourself."

Hence, the self is a multilevel system—not simply reducible to genes or neurons—that emerges from multifaceted interactions of mechanisms operating at neural, psychological, and social levels. Hume was right to note that we cannot directly observe the self, but he was wrong in supposing that reality has to be directly observable.

The self is a theoretical entity that can be hypothesized in order to explain a huge array of important psychological phenomena. The self is very different from the atomic, transcendental, perfectly autonomous self assumed by dualist philosophers, but it is far richer and more explanatory than the skeptical view of philosophers who want to dispose of the self altogether. The self does exist—but as a highly complex, multilevel system of interacting mechanisms.

Paul Thagard, Ph.D. , is a Canadian philosopher and cognitive scientist. His latest book, published by Columbia University Press, is Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Who Am I — Who Am I: The Importance Of Self-knowledge, Self-identity And Self-development

Who Am I: The Importance of Self-knowledge, Self-identity and Self-development

• Categories: Self Awareness Self Identity Who Am I

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Self-Esteem and Self-Compassion: A Narrative Review and Meta-Analysis on Their Links to Psychological Problems and Well-Being

Peter muris.

1 Department of Clinical Psychological Science, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands

2 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

Henry Otgaar

3 Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law and Criminology, Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

The present review addressed the relationship between two self-related concepts that are assumed to play a role in human resilience and well-being: self-esteem and self-compassion. Besides a theoretical exploration of both concepts, a meta-analysis ( k = 76, N = 35,537 participants) was conducted to examine the magnitude of the relation between self-esteem and self-compassion and their links to indices of well-being and psychological problems. The average correlation between self-esteem and self-compassion was strong ( r = 0.65, effect size = 0.71), suggesting that – despite some distinct features – the overlap between both self-related constructs is considerable. Self-esteem and self-compassion displayed relations of a similar magnitude to measures of well-being and psychological problems, and both concepts accounted for unique variance in these measures once controlling for their shared variance. Self-esteem and self-compassion can best be seen as complementary concepts and we invite researchers to look more at their joint protective role within a context of well-being and mental health as well as to their additive value in the treatment of people with psychological problems.

Introduction

William James already described “selfhood” as an essential concept of human psychology. He divided the self into two parts: the “Me”, which refers to people’s reflections about themselves (ie, subjective perceptions of personal characteristics, eg, defining oneself as “rich”, “introvert”, or “intelligent”), and the “I”, which refers to the thinking self that knows who one is or what he/she has been doing in the current and past (also known as the mind). 1 Ever since, many scholars attempted to conceptualize the self, 2 varying from rather concrete descriptions, such as “a collection of abilities, temperament, goals, values, preferences that distinguish one individual from another” 3 to more abstract conceptualizations involving the dynamic self-constructive process of one’s identity as a result of reflexive activities involving thinking, being aware of thinking, and taking the self as an object of thinking. 4 Many self-related constructs, processes, and phenomena have been described in the psychological literature, 5 but within the field of mental health and psychopathology, two concepts have received a considerable amount of empirical attention: self-esteem and self-compassion.

Self-esteem and self-compassion reflect an affectively and/or cognitively charged attitude or response to the self. The nature of both constructs is fundamentally positive, meaning that persons with high levels of self-esteem and self-compassion ought to display greater resilience and higher levels of well-being, and hence lower levels of all kinds of mental health problems. Despite their conceptual overlap, there exist a number of differences between self-esteem and self-compassion. 6 The present review article is focused on the relationship between self-esteem and self-compassion. We will first describe both concepts independently from a more theoretical perspective and address their protective role within the context of mental health and psychopathology. Next, we will focus on the link between self-esteem and self-compassion thereby addressing similarities as well as dissimilarities. The review is not only qualitative in nature, but also includes a meta-analysis to assess the strength of the relation between self-esteem and self-compassion as well as to examine the (unique) links between both self-related concepts on the one hand and indices of well-being and psychopathology on the other hand. Furthermore, we will discuss to what extent self-esteem and self-compassion are susceptible to change and hence might be a suitable target for psychological interventions. Finally, we will provide a brief summary of our findings and address the role and importance of both self-related constructs for understanding human resilience and well-being.

Self-Esteem

Self-esteem refers to an affectively laden evaluation of the self. 7 More specifically, this construct refers to “an individual’s subjective evaluation of his or her worth as a person”. 8 This is defined by a person’s perception of his/her abilities and qualities in various domains, including intellect, work performance, social skills, physical appearance, and athletics. It is important to emphasize that self-esteem does not necessarily reflect the actual abilities or features of a person but mainly refers to how a person thinks or feels about these qualities and characteristics. There is concrete evidence that the concept reflects a trait-like variable that is relatively stable across time. For example, Kuster and Orth 9 conducted a longitudinal study with repeated measurements taken from adolescence to old age and showed that

self-esteem does not fluctuate continuously over time in response to the inevitable mix of successes and failures we all experience as we go through life [but has] a level of stability that is comparable to that of basic personality characteristics such as neuroticism and extraversion.

Their data indicated that one can foretell a person’s relative level of self-esteem (as compared to other people, eg, high versus low) across decades of life. 8

Regarding the function of self-esteem, three main perspectives have been proposed. First, the self-determination perspective assumes that self-esteem serves a motivational function that prompts people to take care of themselves and to explore and reach their full potential. 10 A distinction is made between contingent self-esteem, which refers to positive feelings and thoughts about oneself that are dependent on some achievement or fulfilment of expectations, and true self-esteem, which pertains to a stable, securely based, and solid sense of the self. Or in other words: The person is comfortable with whom he/she is and how others will perceive him/her and is no longer involved in a process of critical self-evaluation. Both types of self-esteem are related to human motivation. Contingent self-esteem is predominantly linked with extrinsic motivation: A good sense of the self is achieved because one engages in activities that will yield a reward or avoid punishment, whereas true self-esteem is typically associated with intrinsic motivation: Positive feelings of self-worth are elicited when performing activities that match one’s personal needs and values.

The second perspective on the function of self-esteem is subsumed under the terror management theory. 11 According to this perspective, human beings can be distinguished from other species because they can reflect on the fact that the world in which they live is an uncontrollable, absurd setting in which their own impeding death is the only inevitable certainty. To cope with this mortality salience, people have developed a cultural worldview that is infused by order, predictability, meaning, and continuity. Terror management theory postulates that self-esteem refers to a sense of personal value that is grounded in beliefs about the validity of the worldview and the extent to which one can abide to the cultural standards of that worldview, which would function as a buffer against the fear of death. 12 People with high self-esteem have a more positive and less fatalistic attitude towards life than people with low self-esteem, and hence are better able to deal with everyday reminders of their death and the finiteness of life.

The third account is the sociometer perspective that views self-esteem as an innate monitoring system that measures a person’s relational value to other people, or in more concrete words: “the degree to which other people regard their relationship with the individual to be valuable, important, or close”. 13 When self-esteem is high, the person has the idea that he/she is valued by others as a respectable and worthy individual and this will fuel behaviours that serve to maintain and enhance relationships with other people in order to preserve this social status. In contrast, when self-esteem is low, the person perceives that his/her social position is on the line, which evokes an emotional response as an alarm signal that prompts behaviours to gain and restore relations with others. Thus, according to sociometer perspective, self-esteem is viewed as an affect-driven meter that continuously monitors and reacts to signs of social acceptance and rejection. This monitoring system would have evolutionary roots because relationships with other people are an important asset promoting survival. 14

Self-Esteem and Life Outcomes

Whether conceiving self-esteem as a vehicle of motivation, a buffer against the fear of death, or a social thermometer, all these functional accounts align with the notion that the construct has a positive nature and hence may promote psychological well-being and protect against mental health problems. Although some scholars are rather critical and sceptic about the presumed benefits of self-esteem, arguing that its merits are quite limited and that there are even downsides of having (too) much confidence in one’s worth, 15 there is a voluminous amount of empirical work supporting its association with positive outcomes. For instance, in an influential large-scale study including more than 13,000 college students in 31 countries from all over the world, self-esteem correlated positively with life satisfaction (with an average r of 0.44), 16 meaning that the more participants were content with themselves, the stronger they indicated being happy with their life. As another example, Chen et al 17 conducted a meta-analysis to examine the relationship between self-esteem and depression. Using the data of 50 cross-sectional studies conducted in Taiwan, a mean correlation of −0.48 was detected, indicating that higher levels of self-esteem were associated with lower levels of this type of emotional psychopathology. In a recent comprehensive meta-analytic review of the literature, Orth and Robbins 18 drew up the balance and concluded that

high self-esteem helps individuals adapt to and succeed in a variety of life domains, including having more satisfying relationships, performing better at school and work, enjoying improved mental and physical health, and refraining from antisocial behaviour.

Self-Compassion

Self-compassion refers to how people treat themselves when they encounter failure, deficiencies, or suffering in their personal life. According to the widely used definition of Neff, 19 the construct consists of three key elements: (1) self-kindness, which refers to being warm, kind, and understanding towards oneself in times of adversity; (2) common humanity, which pertains to the acknowledgment that all human beings face challenges in life and hence are subject to drawbacks and suffering; and (3) mindfulness, which has to do with an awareness of personal discomfort while maintaining the perspective on other more positive aspects in life. In general, self-compassion entails displaying a positive and healthy attitude to the self, which enables the individual to deal effectively with the usual setbacks in human existence. 20

About the functionality of self-compassion, Gilbert 21 conceptualized the construct in evolutionary terms. This scholar initially focused on compassion, which he viewed as a motivational system to regulate the negative affect of other people through engagement in supportive and affiliative actions that ultimately serve to maintain the group bonding and as such the survival of the species. Because human beings gradually developed the mental capacity to reflect on themselves, they can also deploy compassion towards the self in case they encounter setbacks and associated negative emotions. This self-compassion enables them to effectively cope with such emotional dysregulation ensuring their full participation in social life.

In a recent review of the literature, Strauss et al 22 concluded that

[self-]compassion is a complex construct that includes emotion but is more than an emotion, as it includes perceptiveness or sensitivity to suffering, understanding of its universality, acceptance, non-judgment, and distress tolerance, and intentions to act in helpful ways.

In view of these elements, one might expect that self-compassion tends to fluctuate over time and across situations, but there are clear indications that the construct – just like self-esteem – is quite stable and thus can best be seen as a trait-like individual difference variable. 23

Self-Compassion and Life Outcomes

Since its introduction in the psychological literature, many studies have been conducted investigating the positive effects of self-compassion. For example, Zessin et al 24 conducted a meta-analysis examining the relationship between self-compassion and various types of well-being, such as happiness, positive affect, optimism, life satisfaction, health, belongingness, and autonomy. Combining the results of 79 samples that included a total of 16,416 participants, an overall positive effect size of 0.47 was found with higher levels of self-compassion being generally accompanied by higher levels of well-being. This suggests that a caring attitude towards oneself when facing adversity serves to maintain a sense of feeling comfortable, happy, and healthy in life. In a similar vein, MacBeth and Gumley 25 synthesized the findings of 14 studies linking self-compassion to indices of psychopathology to obtain an average effect size of r = –0.54. This demonstrates that higher levels of this self-related trait are associated with lower symptom levels of anxiety, stress, and depression, and is in line with the notion that self-compassion may immunize individuals from developing psychological problems. 26

(Dis)similarities Between Self-Esteem and Self-Compassion

Self-esteem is a concept with a fairly long research tradition: especially after Rosenberg published his seminal book in the mid-1960s, 27 which also included a comprehensive scale for measuring the construct, psychologists increasingly focused on this construct in their research. This steadily culminated in an annual amount of more than 600 publications and over 26,000 citations in 2022 (in Web-of-Science using [“self-esteem” in title] as the search term), which makes self-esteem currently one of the most frequently studied concepts in psychology. The construct of self-compassion was introduced only at the beginning of the 21st century when Neff published her first papers on the topic, 20 , 28 but its popularity is still clearly on the rise (reaching 382 publications and 10,123 citations in 2022). 19 , 29 It is important to note here that the concept of self-compassion was partly introduced because of dissatisfaction with the construct of self-esteem. Specifically, critical scholars argued that because self-esteem is largely contingent on responses of others and events happening in life, the concept was argued to have little predictive value. It would merely reflect social status and personal failure or success, and as such it is hardly surprising that people who are marginalized, face a lot of adversity in life (eg, abuse and neglect), and suffer from psychopathological conditions, also display low levels of self-esteem. 15 , 30 Moreover, questions were raised regarding the malleability of (low) self-esteem: for example, positive feedback, flattering, and praise are difficult to reconcile with the negative picture that people (sometimes) have about themselves and hence do not automatically result in a more positive self-view. 20 Self-compassion is assumed to not have these drawbacks: This trait would be less dependent on the proceedings of life and is also thought to be more mouldable, making it a suitable target for intervention. 19

Whether the critical attitude towards self-esteem and the positive stance towards self-compassion is all justified, is still a matter of debate. 18 , 29 Fact is that both self-related concepts also share a number of important features. That is, as noted earlier, both are trait-like variables that refer to a benign psychological attribute of human beings characterized by a positive reflection about the self. Furthermore, from a theoretical point-of-view, they are both thought to promote adaptive and prosocial behaviour and as such are generally considered to be protective in nature, boosting the person’s positive affect and well-being, and preventing the development of psychological problems.

Despite these commonalities, there are also a number of notable differences between self-esteem and self-compassion. First of all, the relationship with the self is not the same for both concepts. That is, whereas self-esteem pertains to a positive evaluation of the self as compared to others or in the light of some general normative standard, self-compassion concerns a positive attitude towards the self when facing difficulties, without making any evaluative or comparative judgments. 19 Second, self-esteem is more concerned with a cognitive appraisal process that – although initiating defensive reactions to maintain or even improve one’s sense of worth – by itself does not incorporate any coping mechanism. 31 , 32 In contrast, self-compassion incorporates a positive action tendency: 22 cognitive strategies, such as positive self-talk and cognitive reappraisal strategies are deployed to alleviate the suffering. 33 Third and finally, self-esteem and self-compassion are thought to be mediated by different brain-based systems. 34 , 35 In terms of Gilbert’s social mentalities theory, 21 , 36 self-esteem seems to be more associated with an activation of the sympathetic threat system, which alerts the person for possible downward social mobility and inferiority and instigates operations of agency and competition. In contrast, self-compassion would reflect an activation of the parasympathetic soothing system, which aims to regulate negative emotions by seeking support and connection with others. 6 , 37

Meta-Analytic Intermezzo

Given the similarities between self-esteem and self-compassion, while also acknowledging their differences, it can be expected that both constructs will be “moderately correlated”. 6 Furthermore, there is a tendency in the literature to depict self-compassion as the more beneficial psychological concept, 19 , 20 , 37 and so it can be predicted that self-compassion will show more robust links to indices of well-being and show greater potential for shielding against stress and other psychological problems than self-esteem. To empirically test these suppositions, we conducted a meta-analysis which has the advantage of combining the results of multiple scientific studies, thereby providing a more accurate look at these topics. 38

Meta-Analytic Procedure

In the first week of March 2023 (more specific, on March 6, 2023), a literature search was conducted in Web-of-Science with [“self-compassion” in topic] AND [“self-esteem” in topic] as the search terms. The searching period was 2003 (ie, the year that the construct of self-compassion was first referred to in the scientific literature) to 2023. Wilson’s 39 online meta-analysis effect size calculator was used to calculate the Fisher’s z -transformed correlation ( r ) and the accompanying 95% confidence interval (CI) as an effect size indicator for the correlation between self-esteem and self-compassion in each study as well as for the correlations between self-esteem and self-compassion on the one hand and each variable representing well-being or a psychological problem. Fisher’s z -transformed correlations and CIs of multiple well-being or psychological problems indicators were averaged for each study and eventually across all studies. We expected to obtain positive effect sizes for the relations between self-esteem/self-compassion and indices of well-being, whereas we anticipated negative effect sizes between both self-related concepts and measures of psychological problems.

Results of the Meta-Analysis

As can be seen in the PRISMA flow diagram 40 ( Figure 1 ), the literature search yielded 221 hits, which were all inspected for suitability by the first author. Seventy-six papers (including 85 samples) were identified as relevant because they included the correlation between the traits of self-esteem and self-compassion. The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale 27 was used in 66 of these studies (86.8%), whereas the Self-Compassion Scale 28 (or its short-form 41 ) was employed in 71 investigations (93.4%), indicating that these self-reports are the dominant measures in this research field. As can be seen in Table 1 , the average correlation between self-esteem and self-compassion was positive and strong: r = 0.65, with an effect size of 0.71. Outcomes were rather heterogeneous [which may have been caused by sample differences (eg, adolescent versus adult, clinical versus non-clinical), and measures of self-esteem and self-compassion used (eg, shortened versus long version, other measures than the Neff and Rosenberg scale)] and the funnel plot ( Figure 2 ) showed some asymmetry (rank correlation: value = −0.23, p = 0.002; regression test: value = −3.21, p = 0.001): This was mainly due to a number of investigations showing a relatively small correlation between self-esteem and self-compassion. However, none of the studies showed a result that was in contrast with the average outcome.

Results of the Meta-Analysis of Studies on the Relation Between Self-Esteem (SE) and Self-Compassion (SC) and the Relations Between Both Self-Related Constructs and Indices of Well-Being and Psychological Problems

Notes : † Heterogeneity was evaluated by means of the open-source software package Jamovi ( https://www.jamovi.org ). The Q-statistic was significant for all analyses, indicating that the results were heterogeneous across studies.

PRISMA flow diagram depicting the selection of articles that were included in the meta-analysis on self-esteem, self-compassion, and psychological problems/well-being.

Funnel plot of the studies reporting on the correlation between self-esteem and self-compassion.

Sixty-nine studies reported on the relations between self-esteem and self-compassion, on the one hand, and variables reflecting aspects of well-being ( k = 45, 46 samples; eg, satisfaction with life, meaning in life, positive affect, belongingness, support, self-control, self-efficacy) and/or psychological problems ( k = 69, 72 samples; eg, anxiety, depression, self-criticism, negative affect, rumination, body dissatisfaction, stress, narcissism, and anger), on the other hand. As can be seen in Table 1 , both self-related constructs displayed comparable relations to indices of well-being and psychological problems. That is, the relations between self-esteem and self-compassion and well-being variables were positive, while the relations with psychological problems were negative, with all average effect sizes being quite large (ie, between |± 0.40| and |± 0.49|). Data showed again considerable heterogeneity (which is not that surprising given the large variety in well-being and psychological problems variables) although the outcomes of individual studies were generally in the same direction as the average outcomes. Note further that the obtained average effect sizes compared well with those found in previous meta-analyses investigating the effects of self-esteem and self-compassion separately. 16 , 17 , 24 , 25

Given the overlap between self-esteem and self-compassion, we conducted an additional analysis using an online second-order partial correlations calculator ( http://vassarstats.net/par2.html ). With this tool, it was possible to compute correlations between self-esteem and self-compassion and other variables, while controlling for the overlap between both self-related traits. The results showed that the links of self-esteem and self-compassion with indices of well-being and psychological problems clearly attenuated when controlling for this shared variance (ie, effect sizes between |± 0.19| and |± 0.30| ( Table 1 and Figure 3 ). However, the effect sizes of the partial correlations were of a similar magnitude for both self-related constructs and remained statistically significant, indicating that self-esteem and self-compassion each accounted for a unique proportion in the variance of well-being and psychological problems measures.

Average effect sizes ( r ) found for the (partial) relations between self-compassion and self-esteem, on the one hand, and indices of well-being and psychological problems, on the other hand.

Altogether, the results of our meta-analysis demonstrate that the relation between self-esteem and self-compassion is quite strong and that the effect size for their correlation should be qualified as “large” rather than “moderate”. 42 This signifies that – despite some unique features – the overlap between both self-related constructs is considerable and implies that in research aiming to explore the relative contributions of self-esteem and self-compassion in the prediction of well-being or psychological problems, these variables will to some extent compete for the same proportion of the variance. Nevertheless, we also noted that even when controlling for their overlap, self-esteem and self-compassion remained significant correlated to indices of well-being and psychological problems. The average effect sizes for their unique contributions were largely comparable, with statistical comparisons even indicating that self-esteem was somewhat stronger correlated to both well-being and psychological problems than self-compassion ( Z ’s being 10.60, p < 0.001 and 6.58, p < 0.001, respectively). Thus, no evidence was obtained to support the claim that self-compassion has more potential as a positive-protective variable than self-esteem.

Further Reflections on the Link Between Self-Esteem and Self-Compassion

The above findings warrant some further elaboration on the relation between self-esteem and self-compassion. The strong correlation points out that these two self-related constructs have much in common: Those who positively evaluate their worth as a person, will also treat themselves with kindness when facing adversities. In particular, it seem plausible that individuals with “true” self-esteem, that is, an authentic sense of self-worth that is not dependent on comparisons with others or fulfilling some general standard, will be more inclined to display self-compassionate responding in times of suffering. 20 There are also empirical data to support this notion. In a longitudinal study, 43 2809 adolescents completed measures of trait self-esteem and self-compassion annually for a period of four years. The results indicated that on each point in time, self-esteem and self-compassion were substantially correlated, and that across time, both self-related constructs demonstrated considerable stability. Most importantly, the data showed that self-esteem emerged as a consistent predictor of self-compassion across the four years of the study, but not vice versa. The researchers concluded that “the capacity to extend compassion toward the self depends on one’s appraisal of worthiness”, 43 which suggests that self-esteem is a more generic positive trait that serves as the basis from which compassionate self-responding may develop.

Measurement issues might also be partially responsible for the observed overlap between self-esteem and self-compassion. The dominant measures in this research field – the Self-Compassion Scale (as well its short version) and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale – not only consist of items that directly measure the intended positive constructs, but also contain items that reflect their negative counterparts, ie, uncompassionate self-responding (including self-criticism, social isolation, and rumination) and lack of self-esteem. 44 , 45 It is unclear to what extent the shared variance between the common self-esteem and self-compassion measures can be attributed to the overlap between the protective elements in both measures or to the reversed scored vulnerability components included in both scales. As an aside, it should also be noted that the inclusion of vulnerability components in measures of self-esteem and self-compassion may undermine their external validity: Relations with indices of positive psychological features of well-being could be constricted, while relations with indices of psychological problems might be inflated. In the self-compassion literature, empirical evidence exists for such an unwanted measurement artifact 29 , 45 , 46 (although it has been consistently trivialized as “the differential effects fallacy” by self-compassion advocates), 19 , 47 but in self-esteem research this issue has been largely neglected. In spite of its widespread use only relatively few scholars have taken interest in studying the unwanted effects of the inclusion of the negatively worded items in the Rosenberg scale, 44 , 48 , 49 and hence this remains a timely and important topic for further scientific inquiry.

Self-Esteem–Enhancing Interventions

Numerous interventions have been proposed that aim to raise people’s self-esteem, but cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is one of the most frequently employed methods. 50 CBT is based on the notion that low self-esteem can best be seen as negative beliefs about the self (eg, “I am not good enough”, “I am not competent”, “I am unlovable”) – that originate from negative life experiences – which prompt maladaptive (ie, avoidant and unhelpful) behaviours. These maladaptive actions are likely to reinforce the negative self-beliefs and eventually the person becomes trapped in a downward spiral of dysfunctional cognition, emotion, and behaviour. During CBT, psychoeducation is provided (to enhance the person’s awareness of this vicious circle), cognitive therapy is applied (to challenge the negative beliefs and to replace these by more realistic and positive beliefs), and adaptive behaviour is practiced and reinforced. Meta-analyses have indicated that CBT is indeed quite successful in promoting self-esteem in clinical and non-clinical populations. 50 , 51

Other interventions that have been applied to boost self-esteem include among others: reminiscence-based therapy, during which positive autobiographical memories are retrieved and discussed (this intervention was originally developed for elderly individuals 52 but can also be applied to younger people); 53 support groups that focus on the discussion of problems and receiving positive feedback and support from peers; 54 art therapy, which involves the deployment of creative activities (such as painting, sculpture, dance, and music) to explore, express, and adjust inner thoughts and feelings, resulting in greater self-understanding and less negative emotion; 55 and evaluative conditioning, which involves a computerized training during which self-related stimuli (eg, “I” or the person’s name) are systematically paired with positively valenced traits and features. 56 All these treatments have indeed been demonstrated useful for enhancing self-esteem, with effect sizes in the small (ie, evaluative conditioning, reminiscence-based therapy) to moderate (ie, support groups, art therapy) range. 50

Positive psychology interventions have also been put forward to promote people’s self-esteem. Such interventions have the purpose to encourage the person to discover and foster his/her character strengths, thereby increasing self-acceptance and self-worth. 57 Compassion-focused treatments are a good example of a positive psychology approach, and this type of intervention has also been explored as a way to enhance self-esteem. 58 For instance, Louis and Reyes 59 developed an online cognitive self-compassion program for promoting self-exploration, self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-love, positive coping, and emotion-regulation skills in young people. In a first test, the efficacy of the self-compassion program was evaluated in a sample of 192 adolescents aged 11 to 17 years who had been exposed to domestic violence. 60 Half of the adolescents were randomly assigned to the experimental group, whereas the other half was allocated to the waiting list control group. It was found that adolescents in the experimental group showed a substantial increase in self-esteem, and such a positive change was not noted in the control group. Based on this result, the researchers concluded that the online self-compassion program seems to be a useful intervention for enhancing self-esteem in at-risk youth.

Meta-analyses have indicated that in both child and adult populations, various types of interventions yielded a positive effect on people’s general self-esteem, with average effect sizes being in the small to moderate range (with d ’s of 0.38 and 0.21). 50 , 61 O’Mara et al 62 obtained a larger effect size ( d = 0.51), but it should be noted that their analysis also included studies that examined the effects of interventions targeting one specific self-concept domain (which appears to be more effective). Interestingly, some interventions (eg, CBT) were more successful in boosting self-esteem than others (eg, reminiscence-based therapy), 50 but compassion-focused treatments certainly belonged to the most powerful ones. 58

Regarding the benefits of self-esteem interventions, two additional remarks are in order. First, most of the research on this topic has focused on self-esteem as the outcome variable, which is logical as promotion of this self-related concept is the primary target. However, self-esteem interventions are typically conducted in people with or at risk for mental health problems (eg, anxiety, depression, aggression). There is no meta-analysis to quantify the effects of self-esteem interventions on these secondary outcomes, but it can be expected that the magnitude of effects is somewhat smaller than that found for the primary outcome measure of self-esteem. 63 Second, it has been put forward that enhancing self-esteem is not only advantageous but may also contain a risk: When levels of self-esteem become inflated and exaggerated, this might take the form of narcissism, 64 which is a frequently used argument for preferring self-compassion over self-esteem interventions. 19 Although research has indicated that self-esteem and narcissism are positively correlated, 65 it has also been noted that this relation is quite weak and that both constructs are different in nature. 66 Moreover, the danger of inadvertently enhancing self-esteem to excessively high levels seems less plausible in clinical settings where most patients display a lower sense of self-worth.

Compassion-Focused Interventions

During the past 20 years, interventions have been developed that focus on the cultivation of compassion, 67 and typically such treatments can also be applied for fostering self-compassion. 68 , 69 Well-known examples are Compassion-Focused Therapy, 70 Mindful Self-Compassion, 71 and Cognitively Based Compassion Training. 72 Although these interventions share a number of features, such as psychoeducation on the role of (self-) compassion for people’s well-being, mindfulness exercises – which promote self-awareness and paying attention to the present moment, without judgment, and active experiential activities during which participants rehearse specific (self-) compassion strategies, there are also notable differences among them that are guided by specific theoretical underpinnings. 73 This implies that there is considerable variation across treatments regarding the competencies that are targeted (eg, empathy, distress tolerance, acceptance) as well as the methods that are employed (eg, meditation, guided imagery, cognitive techniques).

With regard to the efficacy of the self-compassion treatments, two meta-analyses 68 , 69 have demonstrated that such interventions are effective at increasing self-compassion (with g ’s being 0.75 and 0.52, respectively) and decreasing various types of psychopathology indicators, such as anxiety, depression, stress, and rumination (with g ’s in the 0.40–0.67 range). From these findings, it can be concluded that self-compassion is a malleable trait and that engendering compassionate self-responding also has positive effects for people’s well-being and mental health. Furthermore, a comparison of the effect sizes with those of self-esteem interventions yields the impression that it is somewhat easier to increase people’s self-compassion than to boost their self-esteem.

A few studies have directly compared the effects of self-compassion and self-esteem interventions. For example, Leary et al 74 invited participants to write about a negative event that happened to them in the past. The main contrast involved participants who were prompted to think and write about themselves in a self-compassionate manner (by engaging in self-kindness and adopting a common humanity perspective and a mindful point-of-view) versus participants who were guided to think and feel positive about themselves to promote their self-esteem (by focusing on their positive characteristics and interpreting the event in a more positive way). The self-compassion intervention resulted in a more pronounced reduction of negative affect and greater self-acceptance than the self-esteem intervention. Similar results have been obtained in research comparing the efficacy of self-compassion and self-esteem interventions within the context of eating disorders and body dissatisfaction: Self-compassion–inducing writing produced more positive bodily feelings and greater reduction in eating disorder symptoms than self-esteem–inducing writing. 75–77

In conclusion, while these were all studies with non-clinical samples in which a rather simple manipulation of self-compassion and self-esteem was conducted by means of writing exercises, the results nevertheless indicated that induced self-compassion is associated with better outcomes than induced self-esteem. Together with the observation that self-compassion appears easier to generate, one might conclude that interventions targeting this characteristic have greater potential for building resilience and well-being than interventions focusing on self-esteem.

Self-esteem and self-compassion are both constructs that involve a positive attitude towards the self, which are thought to serve psychological resilience and as such play a role in the preservation of people’s mental health and well-being. 78 While self-esteem is already an older concept that has been a topic of psychological investigation for more than half a century, self-compassion was only introduced some 20 years ago during the start of the positive psychology movement. 79 If one wants to introduce a new psychological construct, it is always wise to point out in what way it can be differentiated from or adds something new beyond any existing concept. 80 So, in the first writings on self-compassion, a comparison was made with self-esteem in an attempt to differentiate the two from one another. 20 Basically, four arguments have been advanced in the literature to make the distinction between the two constructs and to contend that self-compassion has incremental value over self-esteem.

The first argument that has been made is that self-esteem and self-compassion would only be “moderately” correlated. 6 , 20 Our meta-analysis, however, showed that the average correlation between measures of these constructs (mostly the Self-Compassion Scale and the Rosenberg scale) was quite substantial: a mean effect size of 0.71 was found, which should be interpreted as “large”. As we do note important differences between self-esteem and self-compassion (eg, self-evaluation versus self-attitude, appraisal versus coping, and sympathetic threat system versus parasympathetic soothing system), it is certainly not our intention to state that they reflect a similar construct. Meanwhile, the attempts to draw a dividing line between self-esteem and self-compassion have led to the absence of a search for a meaningful link among them. The study by Donald et al 43 is interesting and important in this regard as the results suggest that self-esteem is the more basic trait providing the foundation for the more coping-oriented trait of self-compassion. This makes sense: appreciation and love prompt people to act with kindness to others, and in similar vein a sense of self-worth or self-love will enable persons to be kind and compassionate to themselves. We therefore urge for more studies on the commonalities between self-esteem and self-compassion as well as their temporal association.

The second argument refers to the claim that self-compassion continues to explain a significant proportion of the variance in well-being and psychological symptoms after controlling for levels of self-esteem. 6 , 19 , 20 , 37 Such a result would indicate that self-compassion displays a unique link to these external variables that is not accounted for by self-esteem. Our meta-analysis indeed showed that once controlling for the shared variance between both self-related concepts, self-compassion remained significantly associated with indices of well-being and psychological symptoms, which indeed confirms that self-compassion has incremental value over self-esteem. However, the reverse was also true: when controlling for the influence of self-compassion, self-esteem also remained a significant correlate of well-being and psychological symptoms. The effects sizes documented for the independent contributions (partial correlations) to the external variables were comparable for self-esteem and self-compassion, suggesting that – besides communalities – both concepts harbour unique features that are relevant for understanding human resilience.

The third argument is concerned with intervention. It has been noted that because self-esteem is often contingent on the evaluation of others or on the fulfilment of some general standard – which are both factors outside a person’s control, it is difficult to manipulate this self-related trait. In contrast, self-compassion pertains to how people deal with themselves when they encounter adversities in life, thus referring to a personal attitude that would be more susceptible to change. Indeed, when looking at the effect sizes obtained by researchers on the malleability of both self-related traits, the conclusion seems justified that compassionate self-responding is easier to initiate by treatment than generic feelings of self-worth. This may also account for the finding that self-compassion interventions generally produce greater effects than self-esteem interventions. Assuming that self-esteem is the more basic trait that forms the foundation for self-compassion, a comparison arises with other therapeutic interventions. For example, the cognitive behavioural model of psychopathology assumes that people with emotional problems are often bothered by negative automatic thoughts that fuel disturbing emotions and lead to dysfunctional behaviour. The negative automatic thoughts are grounded in underlying personal schemas, which reflect the core beliefs about oneself, others, and the world. In CBT, therapists will usually first try to tackle the negative automatic thoughts, before addressing the fundamental schemas, which are formed early in life and formed by upbringing and prior experiences, are deeply rooted and hence more difficult to change. 81 However, many CBT-oriented therapists currently adhere the notion that in the treatment of persistent emotional disorders, it is essential to not only focus on negative automatic thoughts but also to attend the underlying schemas. 82 This could also be true when trying to improve self-focused characteristics: An initial intervention to improve self-compassion followed by an intervention to ameliorate self-esteem might yield superior and more lasting effects for building people’s resilience and well-being.

The fourth and final argument that has been made for preferring self-compassion over self-esteem has to do with the presumed downside of self-esteem, namely that (too) high levels of this trait are no longer protective but rather take the form of narcissistic tendencies, which have been found to be associated with a host of pathological outcomes. 83 While it is true that self-esteem and narcissism are positively correlated, 65 it should be noted that this link is not that strong and so this risk should not be exaggerated. Our meta-analysis of the relation between self-esteem and psychological problems still indicated a clear-cut protective effect for this self-related trait even though several studies included narcissism as an outcome variable. 6 , 84 , 85 This implies that on average the positive effects mostly outweigh possible downsides of high levels of self-esteem. Moreover, it may well be the case that a strong reliance on self-compassion also comes with drawbacks. For example, it has been noted that high levels of self-compassion may be accompanied by feelings of self-pity and self-indulgence, which would undermine a person’s responsibility for his problems, and interfere with the motivation to try to change the adverse circumstances. 86 There has been a consistent tendency to quickly discard this notion, 19 , 20 but as far as we can see no empirical study can be found that has actually investigated the topic. Certainly, this is an interesting issue for further empirical scrutiny.

To take an advance on the research agenda, Figure 4 depicts a basic model in which self-esteem (true and contextual) and self-compassion (self-kindness and allied adaptive coping strategies) form a psychological buffer that promotes resilience and preserves mental well-being in time of adversity. It is assumed that there is a temporal link between self-esteem and self-compassion, in which the former serves as the foundation of the latter. Interesting, a number of studies have already explored this by testing mediation models in which self-compassion acts as the connecting variable between self-esteem (independent variable) and indices of psychological problems 87 , 88 and well-being 89 (dependent variable). Note also that the model includes potential downsides of both self-related concepts: defensiveness (including narcissistic tendencies) in the case of self-esteem and passivity (in the form of self-indulgence and self-pity) in the case of self-compassion, which may undermine the effectivity of the self-related screen against the drawbacks in life.

Model depicting the presumed role of self-esteem and self-compassion in resilience and well-being.

Final Conclusion

In this paper, we want to put forward that self-esteem and self-compassion are relevant inter-correlated (predominantly) positive constructs that play a role in people’s resilience and maintenance of well-being, and hence provide leads for psychological interventions. Rather than creating a competition – in which it is argued that one construct (ie, self-compassion) is more important than the other (ie, self-esteem), it seems more appropriate to view both concepts as complementary. This would imply that researchers should devote more attention to the unique protective roles of self-esteem and self-compassion within a context of well-being and mental health as well as to their additive value in the treatment of people with psychological problems.

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.