The body changes over time, but you stay the same. There is a continuity in the feeling of inhabiting this body, a signature flavour, a complex concrete memory, which slowly evolves so that it maintains a smoothly flowing identity, but sometimes even that changes suddenly and you feel as if you have to re-learn this body all over again. Intimate as it is, and there is in many ways nothing more intimate than the body, nothing that is more your property - there might be phases of being that are more inward but in relation to them a concept like intimacy no longer quite applies - you retain some detachment from it, like a habit or a house. The psychic self, the locus and reference for that phase of living that is called psychological, seems to be exactly the same kind of intermediate phenomenon as the body. It is historical and evolutionary, retaining its scars and quirks of development, it is contingent but its identity is persistent, and although it has a greater play of associated feelings of being inhabited, it is also exposed to discontinuities. Its being is a melding imagination and memory and yet it has a coherence that must be respected. It is made of a kind of stuff in which objective qualities inhere. Which is to say that the psyche is not coincidentally like the body but is itself a body. Its fascinations are many but you are in it as in a house or institution - it changes and you stay the same. Which is also to say that it is an error to credit it with being the source of what freedom and agency are expressed through it, or to get too excited about its apparent reflexivities since, unlike you, it need not coincide with itself.