Self

The self is a position in a network rather than a thing inside a body, and Marsh wrote the consequence plainly. A self is not consciousness, will or life, being one of five separable elements rather than the whole person, and self is a wholly social creation. Positioning is the operative word, since a position exists only relative to other things and changes when they do, which is why self perception changes with environment and interactions. Someone perfectly confident in one setting is a different self in another, and that is a fact about what a self is rather than an inconsistency in the person. What constitutes the position is a multitude of perspectives reflected back onto the individual, so the self is assembled from outside rather than expressed from inside. Two things follow that matter throughout the framework. The self is not bounded by the body but is a concentric circle of membranes of varying thicknesses, which is why circles of expansion are circles of self rather than of activity. And persistence works differently for the two types, since an endoself is mortal and ceases to exist when its reflection ceases, while an exoself is immortal and will always exist as part of every self it interacted with. Marsh's charge against psychology follows from the definition, since psychology created the mythical individual self to facilitate its binary reality, and terms such as self hate presuppose exactly the bounded unit she denies.

The relational self is a major position, with Mead's social self arising through taking the attitude of others, Cooley's looking-glass self and Hermans' dialogical self all treating the person as constituted through relations. Buddhist anatta denies a substantial self and Hume reached a similar conclusion introspectively. Against these stand the many accounts treating the self as a unified locus of experience, which psychology largely presupposes in its measures. Marsh sits with the relational tradition and adds a decomposition, since separating self from consciousness, will, life and body means the relational claim applies to one element rather than to the whole person, which the relational theorists generally do not do.