The experience of pleasure in a mind-brain hardwired for social interaction, a mind that mirrors others, leads to alienation of pleasure coincident with the formation of a distinction of self from other, and out of this desire is born. And as the consequences are pursued this leads to the experience of envy which strengthens the incipient desiring self and also threatens to tear it apart, two tendencies that work together to create more and more structure, in the process weaving in everything that can be known and used of social space. By the time this stage is reached all the ingredients of the narrative self are in place which now tracks the development of the understanding of the social and its world. This is the bare scheme of an account of the development of the psyche. In this instance it begins from pleasure, from the pleasure principle, but an alternative account could be given starting from desire, or from envy, or conatus, from anything which can serve as the energy source driving a mind and body process. What is it that all these accounts must have in common in order to be appear to shed light on the origins of the self? Perhaps there are just two things. One is a driver that straddles the boundary between the forces of nature and mental forces - for example pleasure can be seen as the release of physiological tension. This seems objective, but if the tension in question is not already mentalised, owned by an 'I', actual or latent, as it would be say by using the term conatus, then there is no reason why one physiological state is preferable to any other. (The compressed air in a tank doesn't want to get out of the tank, doesn't want anything. Whoever put the air into the tank wanted to create a certain kind of energy storage for reasons irrelevant to anything about the air molecules that were the means of doing so. The air tank is the trace of a mind's wanting but is not itself a wanting.) The second is some sort of reflexivity or mirroring, since the self has both and inside and an outside and is subject to and shaped by the complex interplay of these. Again there are various terminologies which try to capture the zero degree of self-other play, and this will open up the social as coterminous with the individual. Neither of these two desiderata has a satisfying solution, and these parallel failures are what is most unvarying about inquiries into the self. What's more they are absolute failures that resist every dialectical trick to flip them into successes - these tricks do no more than remap the descriptive terminology.