The Self and the Myth of the Inner Owner

If emotion is not something felt inside the brain, and belief is not something stored inside the head, then the concept of the self is standing on increasingly thin ice.

And yet, the self is usually treated as the most obvious of all psychological facts. We are told that there is a me inside — a unified subject who has emotions, holds beliefs, forms intentions, makes decisions, and owns experiences. This self is presumed to be located somewhere behind the eyes, coordinating the machinery.

Neuroscience often softens the language, but rarely abandons the structure. The self becomes a “self-model,” a “narrative centre of gravity,” a “default mode network construct.” The metaphors change; the owner remains.

From a relational ontology perspective, this persistence is telling. The self is not a discovery. It is a commitment.

The Self as an Explanatory Placeholder

Like the mind’s eye and inner emotions, the self functions as an explanatory placeholder: a convenient fiction that allows us to stop asking questions.

Why did this thought arise? Because I thought it.

Why did this feeling occur? Because I felt it.

Why did this decision happen? Because I chose it.

The self is the thing that “has” experiences — which conveniently exempts experience itself from further analysis.

But once we abandon the assumption that phenomena must be owned by an inner subject, the self begins to look less like a cause and more like an effect — a stabilising pattern across relational activity.

No Inner Owner, No Inner Theatre

The self inherits all the same problems as the mind’s eye.

Just as there is no inner screen on which images appear, there is no inner homunculus watching those images, feeling those feelings, or endorsing those beliefs. Every attempt to locate the self inside the brain results either in infinite regress (“who is observing the observer?”) or in quiet hand-waving.

From a relational perspective, this is the wrong question entirely.

There is no thing that is the self, waiting to be found. There is a pattern of coordination that gets misconstrued as an owner.

The Self as a Relational Achievement

What we call “the self” is better understood as a stable construal that emerges across repeated relational cuts:

• linguistic participation (“I,” “me,” “mine”)

• social address and accountability

• memory as narrated continuity

• affective orientation and expectation

• practical agency within shared systems

None of these requires a central owner. What they require is coherence across interaction.

The self is not inside the system. The self is the system’s coherence as apprehended from within a particular perspective.

Crucially, this coherence is not guaranteed. It varies across contexts, cultures, developmental histories, and pathologies — which should already have alerted us that the self is not a natural object.

Why the Brain Keeps Getting Credit

Neuroscience finds correlations between brain activity and self-related reports, and then quietly promotes correlation into location.

But this is the same mistake we saw with emotion and belief. The brain is a necessary participant in the coordination — not the site where the phenomenon resides.

The self is not in the brain any more than a conversation is in a telephone.

What Happens When the Self Fractures

Dissociation, depersonalisation, derealisation, and certain meditative states are often described as disorders or anomalies of the self.

From a relational ontology perspective, they are something else entirely: moments where the usual coherence fails to stabilise.

There is no self “breaking apart.” There is a different pattern of relational organisation — one that no longer supports the familiar narrative of ownership.

This is deeply unsettling precisely because the myth of the self has been doing so much invisible work.

The Self as Myth, Not Illusion

Calling the self a myth is not to deny experience, agency, or responsibility. It is to re-locate them.

Myths are not falsehoods; they are stabilising stories that make a form of life possible. The self is one such story — powerful, useful, and deeply entrenched.

But it is not a thing in the head.

And once we see that, a great deal of psychological theorising begins to look like mythology mistaken for anatomy.

The Cut Ahead

If the self is not an inner owner, then intention, agency, responsibility, and consciousness itself can no longer be treated as private possessions of a brain-bound subject.

They, too, will require re-cutting.

That is where this series is heading.