It’s something that for generations, has been constant. It’s a message. It’s in some of the most popular songs recorded. It’s what many religions discuss at length. It’s what psychologists and philosophers have been debating for centuries. It’s what the self-help industry tries to sell you at every moment they get the chance.
What is it? It’s you. It’s yourself. Okay, not yourself, but your Self.
The Self is defined as the most authentic part of your being. It is what lies beneath the many layers of falsehood that you project to the world.
The psychoanalytic literature has two main messages about the Self: one is the affirmation of the Self, and the other is the negation of the Self.
We see this in philosophy too. If we contrast Nietzsche with Schopenhauer, we get this dichotomy. If we contrast Jung with Lacan, we get it as well. We can also see it play out between science vs religion. Buddhism calls on us to renounce the self, and Christianity warns against the evils of the self. Whereas science promotes the realization of the self. If science can be defined as having a single ethos, it is the triumph of the self against nature, by understanding it, manipulating it, and overcoming it.
In Psychology, Jung claimed that there is a core Self that is unconscious and not easily reachable, and that this core is who we are destined to become, and that deviation from this path of becoming is a great failure of “Self” realization. It is this failure that is the cause of anxiety and distress. But this notion presupposes that it is possible to realize this self successfully. That, with enough effort, we can come to a point where we have found ourselves and can finally rejoice.
The Lacanian notion is different, it is more pessimistic. It says that even the self that is behind the persona is false, that there is no authentic self to be found anywhere, and that this idea is just an illusion, much like religions like Buddhism and Christianity.
And so, in a crude way, all our efforts at understanding the world, for centuries and millennia, is really a by-product of our attitudes towards the Self.
But who is right? Perhaps, the error is in the question. Maybe, no one is right, but both are somewhat right. That is, there is no such thing as a core self, that whatever we think of as our eternal nature, is in fact, constantly changing and morphing into something else. And that our perceived individuality, our perceived independence from the rest of the world, is merely an illusion. But that is not to say that there are no boundaries at all. Instead, much like the question of happiness, we do not become happy after we have achieved our goal.
We become happy in the process of achieving our goal. And much like the dichotomy between the thinker who is high in openness, and the thinker who is biased towards less openness (the liberal vs the conservative), the truth exists somewhere in between our biases. The Self both exists and does not exist. It is both expansive and limited. It is both the most real thing, and the most illusory.