The self has deep roots, dissolve it as we may with philosophical doubts about how and why such an entity, matrix, or independently subsistent interspace for experience need be implicit, and it still comes surging back when the thumbscrews are applied.  Here physical suffering is not just a disjointed set of bounded discomforts such as might occur in a dentist's chair, but the reference back of such discomforts, of bodily malaise and the prospect of unpreventable and unbounded future pain, to a moral and responsible being. The triggers here are such as shame, regret, and guilt, emotions that are both private and social, that overlap any barrier between the two, and where the empathically imagined pain of the other is at least equal in gravity to one's own. One can imagine that the lens of self-consciousness can be adjusted between a close-up macro setting, where experience becomes Humean, constituted out of tiny disjointed and discrete bubbles, and a deep or a wide focus - two quite different alternatives - in which the experience is nominally human, and the subjectivity of the other or the over-all scene, or the group is given emphasis. The self hardly appears in close-up, its phenomenology in the cut-up world is only that of a bare transcendental unity, whereas in the other modes it is a non-optional implicate, although also an insoluble problem to be eternally nagged at, the problem of rightness, of faith, good or bad or mere, or indeed as it's become, of correctness.