Fascinating article and inspiring image, but I have a few problems with the assumptions. In fact, you are quite right to critique and reject the narrative theory of the self, it being much more coherent to say ‘I’ am the story I can not tell, but try to anyway’. And seems this is what you highlight, but then you fall back into just telling yourself another meta-story, one on cognition and behavior, which is just more scientifically worded as “cognitive strategies”. What, in fact, seems to make this not a ‘story’ and more ‘real’, is you fall into a dogmatism of silence: the place of the mind and behavioral tendency, which don’t quite speak or integrate, but reference a more real ‘pre-self — assumed to be directing every John and Sally. In fact, when this more ‘real’ and generalized behavioral cognitive entity is being referenced in your article the general ‘you’ is used: “Who are You Really?”, not the “Who am ‘I’ really?” of individuality. This ‘you’ refers to no singularity of what could be invariant of any individual or ‘I’, it is only the ‘you’ of the masses: a place where someone can confess and professes about others not in their own name, but in generalities about this supposed land of the pre-self. In a religious discourse, they would call this generalized ‘you’ the soul (or ‘voice’ of conscience) and the pre-self the instinctual drives and tendencies. A catechism on Morality and Sin, is not far away as an older name for a ‘cognitive-behavioral strategy’. Freud called this pre-self of behavioral tendencies the ‘id’ and this general ego of the ‘you’, not the self, but the super-self, or super-ego. So, if one were to consider this other ‘game in town’ is still with us, in your article there is still a story, but now it is between three different actors, the id, super-ego, and the ego. Or linguistically, the ‘it’, the ‘you’, and the ‘I’.

There is no ‘cognitive strategy’ or catechism that will save you here. Might as well admit it, just learning to listen and take responsibility for what language is saying, or how ‘it’ is speaking ‘you’ would be a first step in rendering the ‘I’ more coherent.

But thanks for your article, since it is an indication of the state of things in public.

S