Preface

00 Introduction: The self, not a given but a problem

01 The camouflaged self

02 Authentic and inauthentic selves: duty of candour and whistleblowers

03 Ancient Greek practices of self-forming

04 Self as flaneur

05 Authenticity with muscle: the ancient Greek hero

06 Familiars

07 Renaissance self-fashioning

08 The alchemical self as outlaw: an experiment in embodied metaphor

09 Animal or Plant self?: Geography matters

10 The Enlightenment self as ‘subject to’ King and Divinity

11 The enlightened self: beyond subjection

12 Unique identifiers: fingerprints and ears

13 Talking yourself up: illeism

14 Possessed and absent selves

15 The modern ego: the all-seeing ‘I’

16 The origins of ‘self-help’

17 The relational self

18 Self stripped of rights

19 Self engulfed by panic

20 The self-righteous narcissist

21 Paranoia: beside oneself

22 The translational self: an attractor in a dynamic, complex system

23 The narrative construction of self

24 Personal confessional narratives constitute a confessional self

25 The self’s new religion: secular and humanistic

26 Writing out the modern self: postmodern prescriptions

27 Cancelling the self: postmodern anti-narrativists

28 As mad as a hatter: neurodivergent selves

29 Self-consciousness without consciousness: tacit knowing

30 Bodies at their limits: intentional self-fashioning

31 Wired for subjectivity

32 Loneliness

33 The fashioning of family

34 Feminist selves

35 Self as laboratory rat

36 The self in pieces: the Yips

37 Mods

38 Politicised junior doctors

39 The progressively absent self

40 A roof over yourself

41 From carbon to silicon

42 Differance

43 Lacanian subjectivities

44 The neurological self

45 The linguistic transactional self in surgical settings

46 Subject to power/ power runs through the subject

47 Bodies that are no-bodies: the biological self

48 The universal SELF

49 Subject to the abject

50 The final straw: the self’s last sip of life’s juice

Appendix: The disposable self as ‘worm’