What you call yourself is a sense of freedom, a free capability, defined with respect to serial time. On the one hand this temporality is seen in the immediate way in which you find yourself determining a comportment towards the future based on an understanding of conditions that arises from your past experience, on the other it appears in that the you as a distinctive appearance is ever-renewed, so that you are always peripherally aware of many parallel versions of yourself along the thread of the just-been and the just-to-come. The freedom which is inseparable from your essence is in a never-vanishing detachment from all known conditions, a deliberative gap which can only be effectively closed by the tacit decision to adhere to a prior decision. Of course a lot could be said to impugn this freedom, to show that it can't really be freedom at all, only an illusion of it. For example, if you can only respond to conditions, these conditions embrace every detail of your awareness and you have no freedom in respect of how they appear. You can only vote as they suggest and if it appears otherwise, that you retain a capacity for insubordination, this too can be traced to other conditions. Conditions have no obligation to be simple and unconflicted, your illusion of freedom is merely a reflection of the tangled and over-determined nature of conditions. However, there is a contradiction in claims that freedom is an illusion, since only a free subject can be the victim of an illusion - if you draw a mistaken conclusion then there must have been a prior and non-trivial moment of decision. The debate can continue but is misdirected, the error is not in the sense of freedom but but in its priority: freedom is taken as being before conditions when it is always after them. This is why we always find ourselves in the midst of something, as if we have fallen into conditions and commitments alien to our nature - when in fact the awareness of freedom is no more than an outcome of these conditions. This error is compounded by the fact that the time-past of conditions is not the same as the serial time belonging to the sense of self. When we acknowledge the timelessness of the unconscious we are looking at the deep roots of the conditions in a temporality orthogonal to the line on which our waking selves are strung.