Do we have a Self?

The concept of ‘self’ gets talked about a lot in psychology and therapy. And rightly so.  It has a huge bearing on the work we do as therapists, whether we’re working with depression, anxiety, self-image problems, relationship problems, on and on. And many people even come into therapy with the explicit goal of ‘understanding them-selves’.  But the idea of self has baffled scientists and philosophers for centuries. What is it? Is it even real? Where is it? Is it just a feeling we have? The concept of self is important in a number of old and current therapeutic modalities and so I want to try to make sense of all of these and come to some type of conclusion about it all.

Many therapy modalities have some sort of concept and/or language to describe the self.  Most commonly – and I don’t know why this is – these models postulate three parts to the self. Perhaps the most famous is Freud’s division of the self into the id, the ego, and the superego.

More recently, two modalities - Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Internal Family Systems (IFS) - have emerged with quite central ideas about the self. 

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT breaks down the self like this:

Self as a concept – this is the story we tell ourselves about who we are - I am a father; I am a bartender; I am a swimmer; I like chocolate; I am kind; I am lazy; I am messy… We develop these ideas about ourselves throughout our lives but particularly in childhood – who we are, what we like; what we dislike. These stories we have about ourselves are important because they help us to maintain some sense of self coherence. However, if we treat these self descriptions as true, fixed and unchangeable then they can limit us.

Self as a process – evolving ideas about the self in the present, past, and future. The part of you that notices your thoughts, feeling and actions. Research on mindfulness suggests that if we can learn to observe our thoughts and feelings with openness and curiosity we can make better decisions, because we get better at noticing our thoughts and feelings rather than being unconsciously controlled by them.

Self as context (aka ‘observing self’ or ‘transcendent self’) – our sense of self in relation with other people, situations, or time. The part of you that notices you are noticing your thoughts, feelings, and actions. The ‘you’ that has been consistent all through your life, even though you have grown and changed.

In ACT, the goal is to undermine attachment to the conceptualised self and promote contact with self-as-process and self-as-context. Hayes et al (2012) actually put this in quite stark language: ‘ACT therapists take the view that vitality, purpose, and meaning occur when the person voluntarily engages in a kind of perceptual suicide, in which the boundaries of the conceptualised self are softened...’ (p. 222)

They go on: ‘Ironically, most people come to therapy wanting to defend their particular self-conceptualisation even if it is loathsome, harmful or the apparent reason for seeking therapy in the first place. Familiar repeated ideas about oneself – both positive and negative – are treated as things to be right about.’

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

IFS also breaks the self into three parts, but adds a fourth, overarching ‘part’ it simply calls the ‘Self’ (capital S):

Managers: Managers are parts with preemptive protective roles. They handle the way a person interacts with the external world to protect them from being hurt by others and try to prevent painful or traumatic feelings and experiences from flooding a person’s awareness. One example could be perfectionism which means we don’t get picked up for making mistakes.

Exiles: Exiles are parts that are in pain, shame, fear, or trauma, usually from childhood. Managers and firefighters try to exile these parts from consciousness, to prevent this pain from coming to the surface.

Firefighters: Firefighters are parts that emerge when exiles break out and demand attention. These parts work to distract a person’s attention from the hurt or shame experienced by the exile by leading them to engage in impulsive behaviours like overeating, drug use, violence, or having inappropriate sex. They can also distract from the pain by causing a person to focus excessively on more subtle activities such as overworking, or over-medicating.

The Self: IFS also sees people as being whole, underneath this collection of parts. Everyone has a true self or spiritual centre, known as ‘the Self’ to distinguish it from the parts. Even people whose experience is dominated by parts have access to this Self and its healing qualities of curiosity, connectedness, compassion, and calmness. According to IFS, the Self can and should lead the internal system.

According to IFS all the parts want something positive for the individual – there are ‘no bad parts’ – but they can become harmful to an individual by becoming too dominant or too extreme. Parts that have lost trust in the leadership of the Self will ‘blend’ with or take over the Self. The goal of IFS therapy therefore is to achieve balance and harmony within the internal system and to differentiate and elevate the Self so it can be an effective leader in the system (a bit like the Healthy Adult in Schema Therapy). 

There is no Self

Another philosophy, Buddhism (which ACT has its roots in), says there is no self - it’s an illusion. This might seem like a radical claim at first, but upon inspection, it’s quite hard to dismiss.

When you look at a photo of yourself, when you were a child let’s say, though you look different, your personality was different, your memories are/were different, your beliefs were different, and at the atomic level, your atoms are completely different, most people have this sense that the child they’re looking in the photo is still them. It’s you in some way.

But this is very mysterious when you think about it. How can there be a consistent being when everything that forms it changes? How is it you actually? Is it because you have the same memories as that child? You look similar? But what if you have amnesia or a car accident and/or have radical surgery? Are you not you anymore? Moreover, modern psychology teaches that memories are actually our brains reconstruction of our past experiences. We create these to fit the present narrative of what we know now, how we describe ‘me’ now. So, if you think of yourself as a kind person, you’re more likely to remember all the times you’ve been kind to people.

The idea of self is one that is constantly recreated by our brains when the need arises. This does not mean we don’t have a self, just that it doesn’t exist the way we think it does.

Our bodies are made up of sensations, perceptions and thoughts and our brains try to make sense of the randomized nature of our being by creating a story line. It is this story line that we call ‘self’.  This is why the intuitive idea of self we have cannot be true.

When most people think of self they think of something that can exist outside the brain – something like a ‘soul’, some immaterial essence.  And this is the teaching of most religions and is also, I would argue the ‘default’ way that humans think. Humans are natural dualists. By this I mean that we naturally, intuitively, believe that we have two parts (at least): a body AND a mind or a body AND a soul; that there is a ‘ghost in the machine’.  But science teaches that the mind is just the brain (or ‘the mind is what the brain produces’). There is no ‘second brain’ inside our brains or ‘ghost’ or ‘homunculus’ or ‘soul’ hiding away somewhere. But this belief hangs around, even among people who otherwise identify as atheists or materialists. And the reason is sticks around is because it feels to be the case. It just does feel like there’s a ‘me’ somewhere in there inside my head.

I am arguing here that this is an illusion. It may be a helpful one at times (and I believe there are a number of useful illusions that exist, it’s an area of deep interest to me), but not all the time.

Buddhism was onto this idea that the self is an illusion, long before modern neuroscience.

It teaches that there is no underlying permanent substance or soul. Rather, everything perceived is simply perceived by our senses not by ‘I’ or ‘me’.  It moves from there to the more practical, teaching, for example, that material wealth can’t belong to ‘me’ and therefore one shouldn’t crave these things or hold on to them like they’re worth more than just a few good sensations.

The thought that ‘you’ don’t exist, at least not in the way you naturally think, is both terrifying and exciting. It’s terrifying because it goes completely against some of our strongest intuitions.  It feels like other intuitions we have might dissolve along with it, such as free-will and possibly even objective morality. But on the other hand, it’s liberating. You don’t have to think it’s ‘you’ against the world. You’ll see bad things happening to you simply as things just happening. But perhaps, most importantly – and this fits very nicely with ACT - you can start to take the contents of your mind less seriously.  You can start to escape the prison of just helplessly thinking all the time.  You can start to step back and just notice thoughts and feelings as thoughts and feelings that arise in consciousness without feeling that you are anxious, for example.  So if a thought comes into your head like ‘I’m such a loser’ you can notice that thought and say ‘I’m having the thought that I’m such a loser.’ Or if some anxiety shows up in your body you can say ‘I’m noticing some anxious feelings in my chest, heart etc.’ rather than ‘”I” am anxious.’  You can start to see thoughts as thoughts rather than being you. 

This is something of a superpower when you get good at it. It can eliminate vast amounts of suffering from your life and completely alter the relationship you have with your own thoughts.

Conclusion

So, am I saying that ACT and IFS, with their various ‘selves’ are wrong? Not exactly. I suppose I am saying they are ‘wrong’ in the literal sense. But neither ACT or IFS are meant to be literal. They’re using metaphors. And as metaphors, I think they can be very helpful. Just don’t fall into the trap of reification – making something metaphorical real or literal. When someone says they got their heart broken, you don’t believe they literally got their heart broken. You understand it as a metaphor.

It’s the same with the parts of IFS and the ‘selves’ in ACT. They’re not literal or real. They’re just metaphors. And as you might be able to detect, ACT and Buddhism don’t contradict each other, which would be surprising, since ACT is so deeply rooted in Buddhism. No, ACT is just using the various ‘selves’ as metaphors to help you think about yourself. But ACT doesn’t actually teach or believe these are ‘real’ in any literal sense.

IFS is probably a bit further from the truth, just in my opinion, in that it does clearly promote the idea of a true Self.  But again, I don’t think this has to be unhelpful necessarily. And it may just be a personal preference thing.  Some people are more comfortable with metaphors than others and some have more of a preference for accuracy (like me). In the end, whatever works!