ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a common view that in art we can express ourselves, or can represent ourselves to ourselves. Doubts about the self arise from thinking directly about it and about consciousness of self; from the theoretical critique of the unity of the self which is given by psychoanalysis; and from thinking about the way the personal pronoun 'I' is used in speech and writing. One way of indicating what is this self is to say that it is the person, the agent who acts in the world: I am an agent, rather than a perceiver, and my sense of self derives from doing rather than perceiving. It might objected at this point that there must be something given in the organism or mind which is not learnt and which allows a sense of self or the ability to use 'I' to be assumed. There must, for example, already be a self to recognize the self reflected back in a mirror-image.
