Suite 101: 'The English expression ‘self’ is a modest one; in its normal use, it is not even quite a word, but something that makes an ordinary object pronoun a reflexive one: ‘her’ into herself’, ‘him’ into ‘himself’ and ‘it’ into ‘itself’. ‘Self’ is also used as a prefix for names of activities and attitudes, identifying the special case where the object is the same as the agent: self-love, self-hatred, self-abuse and so on. The phrase ‘the self’ often means more than this, however. In psychology it is often used for that set of attributes that a person attaches to himself or herself most firmly, the attributes that the person finds it most difficult or impossible to imagine himself or herself without....read more>>>...
