ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how closely ideas of self are interlinked with concepts of responsibility and ethics. A fully realised distribution of one's sense of self evolves into a homeostasis that spreads out beyond the isolated and defended self to include the realisation of compassion in its true meaning of "feeling with". Western disciplines may now have come to terms intellectually with views of self, but would seem singularly to have failed affectively with conceit and craving. The central Buddhist map of self shows the coming together of five psychosomatic processes or aggregates: form, feelings, perceptions, dispositions and consciousness. Perhaps one can say that different schools of psychotherapy see the image of the self as covering a wider area: intra-, inter- and trans-personal. In practice, the self as construct or even as process has itself been defensively reified and reconsolidated. Psychotherapists deal daily with issues of depression, loss of meaning, lack of self-esteem, and narcissism.
