The self may not be what we think it is
A potential category error at the core of inquiry into human experience
Over the last few years I have been studying how disciplines, institutions, and symbolic systems become detached from reality, and how that breach can be repaired. In the process, a more general inquiry has emerged into the conditions under which reality gets a say at all—ideally before collapse overtakes hallucination.
Whether the object is a telecoms network, a military intelligence backchannel, or an unintelligible court document, the underlying questions remain surprisingly consistent:
How can I tell that this thing genuinely belongs to the category it claims to inhabit?
By what means is that claim grounded?
And when reality and representation diverge, what mechanism exists to detect the mismatch and force correction?
Over time it became clear that these questions were not specific to any one domain. The same failure modes appeared repeatedly: drift, closure, self-reference, synthetic substitutes, continuity preservation, and the gradual loss of corrigibility. Disciplines continued to function — while becoming progressively less reachable by the realities they were supposedly organised around.
Eventually an uncomfortable question emerged:
If institutions, professions, organisations, and governance systems are vulnerable to these dynamics, why would the self be exempt?
At first glance the question seems absurd.
Unlike a court, a bureaucracy, or a scientific institution, the self is not some external object of study. We encounter it directly. We experience ourselves as having an identity. We make decisions, remember the past, imagine the future, and recognise ourselves as the same person across time.
In that sense, we are all experts on ‘the self’.
The suggestion that we may have placed such an intimate and seemingly elementary concept into the wrong intellectual category is therefore rather jarring.
Yet the self occupies a peculiar position in human knowledge. It is not merely an object studied by a single discipline, as it sits at the centre of an entire family of disciplines:
Psychology studies the self.
Psychotherapy heals the self.
Psychiatry diagnoses disorders of the self.
Sociology studies selves in groups.
Theology studies the salvation, formation, or destiny of the self.
Ethics studies the conduct of the self.
Education develops the self.
These disciplines disagree about many things, yet they quietly share the same positive object: the self.
When a concept appears across many disciplines, it is natural to assume that its ontological status is already settled. Yet the history of knowledge is full of examples where something initially treated as a primary object later turned out to be a representation of something deeper:
Heat was once treated as a substance (“caloric”), before being understood as the collective motion of particles.
Species were once treated as fixed and independent entities, before being understood as temporary expressions of evolutionary processes.
Money is often treated as a thing in itself, yet economists increasingly recognise it as a symbolic representation of underlying social and economic relationships.
In each case, the phenomenon did not disappear. What changed was its position within the explanatory framework.
The possibility explored here is not that the self is unreal. Clearly something exists that we experience, describe, and refer to as a self. The question is whether we have correctly classified that phenomenon.
Is it the territory? Or is it part of the map?
Before asking what kind of self we possess, how it develops, how it becomes damaged, or how it may be healed, there is a more primitive question:
How do we know that the self is the object in question rather than an inevitable solution to manage a more fundamental problem?
That possibility is the starting point for a reconsideration of the concept.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the self is not the primary object of inquiry. What then moves into the foreground in its place?
A clue comes from the broader inquiry into symbolic systems.
Across very different domains, the same tension appears repeatedly. Institutions must preserve enough continuity to remain recognisable, while remaining sufficiently open to correction that they do not drift into fantasy:
Courts must preserve continuity while remaining corrigible. They do not cease to be courts when a mistake is made; appeals and reviews provide mechanisms for correction.
Scientific communities must preserve continuity while remaining corrigible. Knowledge accumulates across generations, yet hypotheses, theories, and models remain open to revision in light of new evidence.
Democratic governments must preserve continuity while remaining corrigible. Administrations come and go, yet elections, scrutiny, and accountability mechanisms allow reality to periodically reassert itself.
The challenge of ‘corrigible continuity’ is not unique to institutions. Human beings face the same problem.
Something must preserve continuity of self through time. Without it there can be no memory, responsibility, commitment, relationship, identity, or coherent action.
Yet something must also preserve continuity of contact with reality. Without that, the person becomes closed, self-referential, and increasingly detached from what actually exists. The resulting mismatch eventually reappears as loss, failure, contradiction, suffering, or other forms of corrective feedback.
If psychological life consisted solely of balancing self-continuity against reality-continuity, many familiar therapeutic conflicts would be easier than they actually are. Yet people routinely resist truths they already recognise, maintain burdens that are not theirs, and defend arrangements that clearly work against their own interests.
The reason may be that a third continuity demand is operating.
Human beings rarely exist in isolation. They are embedded within families, friendships, workplaces, communities, institutions, and cultures. These systems possess continuity requirements of their own. They depend upon roles being maintained, stories being upheld, and obligations being honoured.
A third form of continuity therefore enters the picture: the continuity of others.
Much of what we call psychological conflict arises not from a dyadic struggle between self and reality, but from a three-way negotiation between self-continuity, other-continuity, and reality-continuity.
Human minds do not inhabit reality directly; they experience competing continuity structures.
A person may already know what is true. The difficulty is often not epistemic but consequential. Reality is resisted not because it is unknown, but because accepting it may threaten existing structures of self-continuity and other-continuity.
The question therefore begins to shift.
Perhaps the primary phenomenon is not the self. Perhaps it is continuity.
The significance of these three continuities is that they are frequently misaligned. What preserves one may threaten another:
Reality-continuity may require a divorce.
Other-continuity may require staying married.
Self-continuity may require remaining “the kind of person who never gives up”.
Psychological conflict may therefore arise not because a person is defective, irrational, or resistant, but because different continuity demands are pulling in incompatible directions.
If so, then the question changes again.
Instead of asking what the self is, we can ask what absence the self prevents:
A court exists to prevent discontinuity in justice.
A scientific community exists to prevent discontinuity in knowledge.
A government exists to prevent discontinuity in governance.
What discontinuity does the self prevent?
The self may exist to prevent discontinuity in the negotiated relationship between self-continuity, other-continuity, and reality-continuity.
Viewed in this way, ‘the self’ begins to resemble less an object than a solution.
A solution to what?
To the problem of maintaining coherence in the face of competing continuity demands.
Human beings must simultaneously remain coherent, belong, and adapt. These demands are frequently in tension. What preserves one form of continuity may threaten another.
The self may therefore be understood as one of the principal structures through which those tensions are negotiated and managed.
Not the thing being explained, but the thing doing the explaining.
Not the territory, but a mechanism for remaining coherent within it.
A useful reclassification should explain things that previously appeared puzzling.
Why does insight so often fail to produce change? Because understanding and revision are different processes. In extreme cases, explanation itself becomes a continuity technology. The person — or the organisation they inhabit — learns to describe its pathologies with increasing sophistication, while remaining organised in fundamentally the same way.
Why does therapeutic change so often feel like betrayal? Because many continuity structures do not belong solely to the individual. Family systems, relationships, organisations, and cultures frequently depend upon a person maintaining roles, stories, and obligations on behalf of others. What appears as resistance may therefore be loyalty to continuity structures experienced as necessary for self-preservation.
Why do apparently healthy, integrated, and psychologically sophisticated people sometimes remain remarkably difficult to change? Because coherence and corrigibility are not the same thing. A continuity structure can become stable, articulate, emotionally regulated, and socially successful while simultaneously becoming less available to correction by reality.
Viewed through this lens, these are not separate puzzles requiring separate explanations. They become different manifestations of the same underlying continuity-management dynamic.
The central question is no longer whether a person understands themselves, functions effectively, or possesses a coherent identity.
It is whether reality can still get a say — before collapse.
The argument so far has been that the self may not be the primary phenomenon it is usually assumed to be. What we call ‘the self’ may be one of the principal structures through which competing continuity demands are negotiated and managed.
If that reclassification is correct, the consequences extend beyond psychotherapy. They unfold in three layers.
Layer 1: The Category Error
The most consequential assumption under pressure is that the self is the natural unit of explanation. Once continuity is treated as primary, the self begins to look less like the thing being preserved and more like one of the mechanisms by which preservation occurs.
This shift destabilises several related assumptions across the human sciences.
Authenticity loses its straightforward status as a virtue. Being “true to oneself” may simply mean preserving an existing continuity arrangement that reality requires to be revised.
Self-knowledge loses its straightforward status as transformative. A continuity structure can become increasingly sophisticated at describing itself without becoming more open to correction.
Psychological conflict ceases to be purely internal. Many conflicts arise because self-continuity, other-continuity, and reality-continuity make incompatible demands. The contradiction is often distributed across multiple systems even when it is experienced by a single individual.
The individual ceases to be the obvious locus of explanation. What appears as personal dysfunction may be the visible surface of continuity costs being carried on behalf of families, organisations, institutions, or cultures.
Even suffering becomes ambiguous. A person can suffer while remaining highly open to correction. Another can flourish while becoming progressively closed. The deeper failure mode may not be distress but unreachability by reality.
Layer 2: The Clinical Consequences
Once the category error is recognised, several familiar therapeutic concepts become conditional rather than absolute.
Insight ceases to be an unambiguous good. A continuity structure can become highly sophisticated at describing itself while remaining fundamentally organised in the same dysfunctional way. Explanation and revision are different processes.
Integration becomes ambiguous. It can represent increased openness to reality, or it can represent the successful consolidation of a self-sealing organisation. The question is no longer whether integration has occurred, but what has been integrated into what.
Mental health loses its status as the obvious success criterion. Coherence, functioning, emotional regulation, and social success can all increase while reachability declines.
Resistance becomes more intelligible. It is often the lawful protection of an existing continuity arrangement rather than irrationality or avoidance. The useful question is no longer “Why won’t this person change?” but “What would collapse if they did?”
Relapse becomes less mysterious. If the underlying continuity requirements remain unchanged, the personal or organisation will tend to return to familiar stabilisation strategies once external pressure decreases.
Therapy itself begins to look different. Its deepest purpose may not be self-repair, self-understanding, or symptom reduction. It may be the maintenance of the conditions under which reality can still safely enter and trigger correction — an increasing rarity in adult life.
Layer 3: The Generalisation
At this point the argument leaves psychotherapy behind.
The same structural vulnerability appears wherever any symbolic system must preserve continuity while remaining corrigible:
The Soviet Union did not collapse because it lacked bureaucracy. It collapsed because its bureaucratic apparatus became progressively less responsive to reality. Information continued to flow upward, reports continued to be written, and procedures continued to operate, yet reality increasingly lost its capacity to force revision.
A court system does not fail because it lacks procedure. It fails when procedure becomes detached from the realities it exists to adjudicate. The forms remain intact while the corrective link back to reality quietly degrades. This is what I experienced with “ghost courts” for non-crime here in the UK.
Scientific communities face the same danger. A paradigm can become more sophisticated, more mathematically elegant, more institutionally entrenched, and more widely taught while simultaneously becoming less responsive to anomalies that threaten its continuity. “Climate change” is a good example at present.
In every case the declared object remains. The bureaucracy remains bureaucratic. The court remains judicial. The science remains scientific. The therapy remains therapeutic.
Yet something essential has degraded: reality has lost leverage.
The deepest casualty is therefore not psychological but epistemological. The convention being challenged is that the object of inquiry is what matters most. The deeper question is whether reality retains the capacity to force revision within whatever symbolic system is being used to represent it.
Seen in this light, a personal identity, a therapeutic school, a scientific paradigm, a court judgment, and a government bureaucracy are not fundamentally different kinds of problem.
They are all continuity structures. And they all face the same danger: that continuity becomes easier to preserve than to correct.
The argument began with a practical observation.
Scientific theories drift.
Institutions drift.
Courts drift.
Families drift.
Individuals drift, too.
Under pressure, all symbolic systems increasingly organise themselves around continuity rather than correction.
What started as an inquiry into those failures has led somewhere unexpected. The deepest question is not psychological, legal, scientific, or political. It appears to sit beneath them all.
Before any discipline can study its chosen privileged object, a prior condition must be satisfied:
Reality must retain the capacity to force revision within the symbolic system being used to represent it.
Without that pre-condition, knowledge becomes ideology, law becomes procedure, governance becomes administration, and therapy becomes theatre. The formal object remains, while the substantive connection to reality quietly withers.
This suggests that the most fundamental question is not “What is this discipline studying?” but “How does this discipline remain corrigible?”
The same question applies whether the symbolic system is a scientific paradigm, a constitutional court, a government bureaucracy, a therapeutic school, a family narrative — or a personal identity.
In every case the challenge is the same: How does reality retain a say?
The possibility explored here is that this is not a specialised concern belonging to any existing discipline. It may be a more primitive question than the disciplines themselves.
The self is to continuity what money is to exchange.
The self is to continuity what a court is to justice.
The self is to continuity what a parliament is to governance.
The self is not the deepest object of inquiry in human science, because it cannot be.
It is only one instance of a general class of continuity-preserving symbolic structures that must remain corrigible.
A deeper question lies beneath it:
How does reality retain the capacity to force revision within any continuity-preserving system?
‘The self’ is one answer to that question.
It is not the question itself.
I was wondering if you'd bring personal drift right on the heels of institutional. So ... once again, where does personal attribution lie? Values. What are the most fundamental values and why does a living organism need these? Rand: The Objectivist's Ethics; 1961