Circle of self / circle of expansion

A circle of self is a cluster of relationships and interactions, not a phase of life. Marsh is explicit that this is not development in the sense psychologists such as Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud described it. Nobody passes through a caregiver stage and leaves it behind. A healthy self retains all past development intact and goes on expanding for a lifetime, so the circles accumulate rather than replace one another, and there is never a point at which a person stops gaining from voluntary caregiving, from a loved nation, from discovery or creation or from spirituality. Six levels are named: lifegiver, caregiver, nation, discovery, creation and divinity. Each has its own entry in the framework as a self, and each carries its own failure mode. The caregiver-self includes or replicates the relationships a baby first forms with home and caregivers. The nation-self holds those relationships unique to a nation and is often trapped into a state endogroup, the discovery-self into an academic one, the creation-self into a career. Trapped is the word that carries the second half of the definition. Clusters form naturally, through the ordinary reaching outward of a living self, or they form through coercion, and either kind can harden into an endogroup, at which point what was protecting a person becomes the wall that stops them. Dignity, in Marsh's terms, is preservation of ownership over one's own inner circles of self, which is exactly what an endogroup takes.

Concentric models of the self are old and widespread. The Stoic Hierocles arranged a person's concerns in rings running from the body outward to humanity, and Peter Singer revived that image as the expanding circle of moral concern. Anthropology and social network research describe overlapping circles of intimacy and acquaintance in a similar shape. What distinguishes this use is that the circles are made of interactions rather than of moral regard or of contacts, that nothing is outgrown and that the failure being tracked is not a circle left small but a circle sealing itself into an endogroup.