Hi,

Sorry if I sounded unsympathetic... Your explanation helps a lot

I think you will find a lot of people here who can relate to various aspects of it

A lot of work has been done in psychology over the years on identity / the notion of the self etc. I studied it for a while because... I was very curious about what the self was supposed to be, too.

We used to think of the self as something fixed or static. Fairly unchanging throughout the lifespan. Some people... Think that personality disorders are like this... Disorders of the unchanging self. That is what can be so horrible about being dx'd with a personality disorder. To think that ones self is somehow broken or defective and always will be...

Then we started to think of the self as being something that was changing depending on environment / context. For example, the self that people display when they are in church with their grandparents is different from the self that people display when they are in the pub with their drunken mates is different from the self that people display when they are giving their work presentation and so on... The self that executes Jews on command is not the same self who plays with their kids and so on... The self that helps others when there is the scent of vanilla in the air is not the same self as the one that ignores kitty genovese being murdered...

Sometimes people think that the second line of thinking encourages us to believe that people don't really have selves. Or there is no fixed identity, or something like that. I prefer to think that it shows us that... This idea of the fixed Cartesian ego (or immortal unchanging soul) or whatever... Is a bit of a myth. Most people are a lot less integrated than we typically think people are. Most people are unaware of driving between points A and B (they were devoting their cognitive resources to other things). Most people lose conscious awareness every night when they go to sleep... We aren't typically aware of the discontinuity we all experience every day between sleeping and waking... Or leaving for work and arriving...

Most people aren't very reflective. But those who do reflect... Become aware of apparent inconsistencies or conflicts or discrepancies etc...