There is self-awareness but no idea of the self, only the idea of such an idea, put forward to explain certain changes or disjunctions in relationships, certain social facts. Self-consciousness refers both to a psychological occurrence as when there is a suddenly paralysing awareness of being out of step with a social setting and to the broader condition of possessing a second-degree awareness of your own state. The latter is an achievement of maturity, a capability in respect of multiple perspectives, the ability to relativise your own position so that you can grasp and incorporate the differing positions of others in general. With this you can accept criticisms, or make them in what is taken to be a thoughtful manner, you can be self-critical in a constructive way. You become self-conscious in the psychological sense when you fail or believe you have failed at just such an integration, when your native solipsism is exposed, when your self-presentation is faulty, when self-criticism is excessive and unbalanced. You want to be integrated, to be accepted, known in the group, self-aware but without being conscious of yourself, as if in one case your self-consciousness spreads out and is diffused through the group, and in the other it all floods back onto you without having passed through the acknowledgment of others. In the end these are just behavioural descriptions, however they work out they mean that the only contents that point to self are directed patterns of feeling, and their reflections. The shadow of a wince somewhere in the body, an unusual response to a word mentioned, all of these go on, regardless of you lagging behind, as if they already knew what the self implicit in them was.