Is There an Organismic Self?

Is There an Organismic Self?

Yes—although “organismic self” is not one universally defined scientific construct, the idea that there is a more fundamental bodily or organism-level aspect of selfhood has appeared repeatedly across psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience and theoretical biology.

Different traditions have called something close to it the organism, organismic self, ecological self, minimal self, bodily self, proto-self, or organismic identity. These terms are not interchangeable, but they repeatedly point towards a similar question:

Before a person develops a conceptual story about who they are, is there already a self constituted by being this particular living, sensing, regulating and acting organism?

A substantial body of thought answers some version of that question with yes.

The disagreement concerns what exactly should qualify as a self.

Goldstein: The Organism as an Integrated Individual

One important origin lies with neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein.

Goldstein rejected attempts to understand human functioning simply by dividing the organism into isolated mechanisms. His work with brain-injured patients led him towards the idea that injury affected the organisation and behaviour of the whole organism, which continually attempted to preserve and reorganise its functioning in relation to its circumstances (Goldstein, 1934/1939). (DOI)

His concept of self-actualisation originally referred not primarily to achieving an ideal personality but to the organism expressing and maintaining its possibilities through its ongoing relationship with its environment. Later humanistic psychology substantially changed and extended that concept. (DOI)

Goldstein therefore gives us an early organismic understanding in which the individual is not simply:

a mind inhabiting a body

but:

an organised living whole continuously maintaining and expressing itself in relation to its environment.

That already comes close to an organismic conception of selfhood, although Goldstein’s terminology and assumptions should not simply be equated with contemporary neuroscience.

Rogers Made an Important Distinction Between the Organism and the Self-Concept

Carl Rogers developed this organismic tradition in psychology.

His 1959 theory distinguished the organism’s actual experience from the person’s self or self-concept—the organised set of perceptions and values concerning the “I” or “me”. He was particularly interested in circumstances where the person’s conceptual understanding of themselves differed from what the organism was actually experiencing. Rogers called this incongruence (Rogers, 1959). (Taylor & Francis Online)

That is important because Rogers did not originally need to posit two little selves inside a person.

There was:

the organism actually experiencing

and:

the person’s conceptual representation of themselves.

For example:

organismic experience:
I am frightened.

while:

self-concept:
I am a brave person who does not become frightened.

The experience and the conceptual representation can disagree.

Later person-centred writers explicitly adopted the phrase “organismic self” for this experiential side of the person, although the term itself appears to have been coined within later person-centred literature rather than being one of Rogers’ original formal constructs. (Counselling Tutor)

That historical distinction matters. There is good justification for talking about an organismic aspect of self, but we should not retrospectively attribute every later use of “organismic self” directly to Rogers.

Rogers’ Incongruence Is Especially Relevant

Rogers’ theory contains a particularly interesting proposition.

If someone’s self-concept can fail to represent their actual organismic experience accurately, then:

what I believe I am

need not equal:

what my organism is presently experiencing.

Rogers described incongruence as a discrepancy between the person’s self-picture and the organism’s actual experience. Person-centred theorists subsequently developed this into the familiar distinction between self-concept and organismic experience. (Taylor & Francis Online)

That gives an established historical precedent for precisely the distinction our previous question about human and organismic values exposed.

A person can conceptualise:

“this is what matters to me.”

while their ongoing physiological, emotional and motivational experience may indicate something different.

Rogers did not have today’s interoceptive neuroscience available to him, but the conceptual distinction is remarkably clear.

Neisser: The Ecological Self Exists Before a Conceptual Self

Cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser approached the problem differently.

Rather than asking for one definition of the self, he proposed several forms of self-knowledge.

His 1988 model distinguished:

the ecological self — the individual directly perceived as situated and acting within the physical environment;

the interpersonal self — the self experienced in direct interaction with other people;

the extended self — the self understood across past and future;

the private self — awareness that one’s conscious experiences are one’s own;

and:

the conceptual self — the socially informed ideas and theories one has about oneself (Neisser, 1988). (Taylor & Francis Online)

This is highly relevant.

Neisser’s ecological self does not require someone to think:

“I am myself.”

It is present through the organism’s relationship with its surroundings.

Things are:

near me,

far from me,

approaching me,

reachable by me,

behind me

or:

moving because I moved.

The body acts as the reference point.

So there can already be a practically functioning distinction between:

self

and:

world

before the person constructs an elaborate conceptual identity.

The Ecological Self Is Relational

This makes the ecological concept subtly different from imagining an organismic self as something sealed inside the body.

The ecological self exists through the relationship:

organism ↔ environment.

A chair is not merely located at coordinates.

It is:

within my reach.

A wall is:

in front of me.

An object moves differently depending upon whether:

I moved

or:

it moved.

Neisser therefore treats one elementary form of selfhood as directly specified through perception and action in an environment, rather than constructed purely from introspection. (Taylor & Francis Online)

That is one substantial tradition in which the self begins as an embodied perspective, not a biography.

Contemporary Phenomenology Calls Something Similar the Minimal Self

Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi developed another influential distinction between the minimal self and more elaborate forms of selfhood.

The minimal self refers to an immediate, pre-reflective first-person character of experience: experience appears as occurring for this subject without requiring the subject first to think explicitly about themselves (Gallagher, 2000; Gallagher, 2023). (PubMed Central (PMC))

Two commonly discussed components are:

sense of ownership

this body/experience is mine

and:

sense of agency

I am producing this action.

These normally operate so seamlessly that people rarely notice them as separate psychological processes. Experimental and clinical evidence nevertheless shows that ownership and agency can sometimes dissociate, suggesting that even this elementary self-experience has multiple components. (PubMed)

This is closer to experienced organismic selfhood than Goldstein’s biological organism.

It concerns what it is like to be the embodied subject.

The Minimal Self Comes Before the Narrative Self

Gallagher contrasts this with the narrative self.

The narrative self incorporates:

memory,

personal history,

social identity,

future expectations,

roles,

beliefs,

and the stories through which a person understands who they are across time.

A useful distinction is therefore:

minimal/embodied self:
I am the subject here, experiencing and acting now.

narrative/conceptual self:
This is who I understand myself to be across time.

Contemporary work continues to examine how these two forms interact rather than assuming that one can simply be reduced to the other. (Springer Link)

This resembles Rogers’ distinction in an interesting way, although the theories are not identical.

Both allow a distinction between:

ongoing embodied experience

and:

a higher-order representation of who I am.

Neuroscience Has Developed a “Bodily Self”

Experimental neuroscience has approached the question through bodily self-consciousness.

Researchers commonly distinguish several elements:

body ownership — this is my body;

self-location — I am located here;

first-person perspective — the world appears relative to my bodily position;

and:

agency — I am producing this action.

Experimental manipulations such as the rubber-hand illusion and full-body illusions demonstrate that some aspects of bodily self-representation can be altered by changing the relationship among visual, tactile, proprioceptive and other sensory information. (PubMed)

A 2025 meta-analysis of 56 neuroimaging studies found partly distinguishable but interacting neural patterns associated with body ownership and agency, reinforcing the conclusion that bodily self-consciousness is multicomponent rather than a single located “self centre” in the brain. (PubMed)

So modern neuroscience does not find:

the organismic self lives here.

It finds a distributed set of processes contributing to the continuing experience of:

this body, here, acting as me.

Interoception Adds the Inside of the Organism

External body representation is only half the problem.

There is also interoception: information concerning the body’s internal physiological condition.

A substantial modern literature now connects interoception with bodily self-awareness. A 2024 review by Candia-Rivera and colleagues argues that interactions between brain activity and visceral physiology contribute importantly to bodily self-awareness, particularly through large-scale networks rather than one isolated brain region (Candia-Rivera et al., 2024). (PubMed)

Other research similarly suggests that bodily selfhood involves interaction between:

exteroception — information concerning the body from outside;

proprioception — position and movement;

and:

interoception — internal physiological information. (PubMed)

That gives an organismic conception of self considerably more substance.

The self is not only:

the body I can see and move

but also:

the organism whose internal condition is continuously being sensed and regulated.

Damasio Explicitly Proposed a Proto-Self

Antonio Damasio comes even closer to the term we are looking for.

His theory distinguishes a proto-self, core self, and autobiographical self.

The proto-self is the most elementary level: a continuously changing neural representation of the organism’s bodily condition. It does not require reflective consciousness or a story about who the person is. Later levels incorporate organism–environment interaction and eventually autobiographical memory and identity. (PubMed Central (PMC))

The word self here is deliberately being used below the level of ordinary conceptual identity.

In Damasio’s more recent work with Hanna Damasio, interoceptive and homeostatic feelings are proposed to contribute directly to subjectivity by continually identifying mental events with the particular organism in which they occur. Their 2022 and 2024 papers argue that continuous information about internal life regulation may be fundamental to the emergence of conscious subjectivity. (PubMed)

That is a theoretical proposal rather than a settled complete explanation of consciousness, but it is very clearly an organism-first account of selfhood.

Damasio’s Idea Is Particularly Interesting Because the Proto-Self Need Not Know It Is a Self

At the proto-self level there does not need to be a sentence:

“I am hungry.”

There can first be:

this organism’s internal state has changed.

Only at higher levels does that potentially become:

“I feel hungry.”

And still later:

“I am the kind of person who eats carefully.”

Those represent very different forms of self-related information.

Approximately:

organism state

↓

bodily representation

↓

experienced bodily state

↓

conscious attribution

↓

conceptual/narrative interpretation.

We should not assume that Damasio has empirically demonstrated that exact complete progression. But his theory explicitly separates bodily organism representation from autobiographical identity.

Some Researchers Push the Self Deeper Still

Godfrey-Smith and colleagues have proposed a body-self even earlier in evolutionary history.

Their argument starts from the need for moving organisms to distinguish sensory changes caused by their own movement from changes produced externally.

If an organism moves, sensory input changes.

To behave effectively it can benefit from distinguishing:

the world changed

from:

the sensory world changed because I moved.

They use the concept of reafference to explore how sensory-motor organisation could provide an evolutionary precursor to later forms of selfhood. Their proposed “body-self” does not require human consciousness and is intentionally more elementary than Damasio’s proto-self. (PubMed Central (PMC))

This is theoretical evolutionary work, but it asks an important question:

How far back can self/non-self differentiation be pushed before calling it a “self” ceases to be useful?

There is no consensus answer.

Enactivism Goes Further Towards an Organismic Identity

The enactive tradition approaches the question through the organisation of living systems themselves.

An organism must continually produce, preserve and regulate the conditions that allow it to remain the same living system.

In this literature, concepts such as:

autonomy,

self-maintenance,

self-individuation,

adaptivity

and:

sense-making

are used to describe how an organism establishes and maintains itself as an organised unity distinct from, but dependent upon, its environment. (PubMed)

This leads to a particularly relevant proposition.

Because the organism must continue existing as this organised living system, environmental events are not neutral.

Some conditions are:

better for continued self-maintenance

and others:

worse.

Enactive theorists describe this as the emergence of normativity from organismic self-maintenance. (PubMed)

That closely approaches the organismic valuing problem we have just investigated.

The existence of an organismic value implies something that the value is relative to:

better or worse for what?

For:

the continued organisation of this organism.

In that limited sense, organismic valuation and organismic identity are deeply connected.

But “Organismic Self” Can Mean Three Different Things

This is probably the most important distinction to make from the literature.

People sometimes use organismic selfhood to describe at least three different levels.

Biological self

The organism as a self-maintaining, bounded, organised living system.

This does not necessarily imply consciousness.

Enactivism and theoretical biology operate substantially at this level. (PubMed)

Embodied or minimal experiential self

The pre-reflective experience of being:

this body, here, experiencing and acting.

Gallagher, Zahavi, bodily-self research and some aspects of Damasio’s work operate here. (Frontiers)

Organismic self in humanistic psychology

The person’s ongoing lived, bodily and emotional experience, distinguished from the consciously constructed self-concept and socially internalised conditions of worth.

This derives particularly from Rogers and subsequent person-centred theory. (Taylor & Francis Online)

These levels may be related.

They should not simply be declared identical.

Neisser Gives Us an Additional Warning Against Searching for One Self

Neisser’s work is useful here because he explicitly argued that different forms of self-knowledge arise from different kinds of information.

His ecological, interpersonal, extended, private and conceptual selves are not five little people occupying the same organism.

They are different aspects of the same individual disclosed through different informational relationships. (Taylor & Francis Online)

Shaun Gallagher’s later pattern theory of self takes a similar pluralistic direction. Instead of asking which single candidate—the body, narrative, social identity, agency, emotion, memory—is the “real self”, it proposes that selfhood emerges as a dynamically organised pattern involving several such processes. (PubMed Central (PMC))

That seems an important safeguard.

The discovery of an organismic dimension does not require us to conclude:

there is a second person inside the conceptual person.

It may instead indicate:

selfhood exists at several interacting organisational levels.

The Organismic Self Need Not Be Fully Available to the Conceptual Self

This is where several previously separate research traditions begin to overlap particularly interestingly.

The organism continuously contains information concerning:

heart rate,

temperature,

metabolism,

muscular state,

visceral activity,

posture,

movement,

pain,

fatigue,

and many other variables.

Only some of this becomes conscious experience.

Only some conscious experience is then accurately interpreted.

And only some interpreted experience becomes incorporated into the person’s explicit self-concept.

Modern interoceptive research therefore makes it difficult to assume that:

what I consciously know about myself

equals:

everything my organism is currently registering about itself.

Research increasingly connects interoception not only with bodily sensation but with the stability and construction of higher-order self-concepts. (PubMed)

That gives Rogers’ much older distinction between organismic experience and self-concept a surprisingly modern point of contact, even though the underlying theories and terminology differ.

An Organismic Self Would Also Be Continuously Present

The conceptual self can disappear temporarily from attention.

You do not constantly think:

I am this particular person with this biography and these values.

Yet:

your body remains located,

temperature remains regulated,

posture remains controlled,

sensory information remains organised relative to your position,

actions continue to be distinguished from external events,

internal physiology continues to be monitored.

The organismic basis of self-related processing therefore appears continuous in a way that explicit self-reflection is not.

Damasio’s recent hypothesis makes precisely this continuity important: homeostatic feelings are proposed to provide an uninterrupted organism-related background from which conscious subjectivity can arise. (MIT Press Direct)

This Does Not Establish a Hidden “True Self”

There is an important boundary here.

Person-centred writing sometimes describes the organismic self as the real self. That language has therapeutic meaning, but it risks making a stronger scientific claim:

some organismic layer contains the person’s objectively true identity.

Contemporary bodily-self research does not establish that.

A person can have genuine bodily experience without that experience providing a complete solution to:

what career should I choose?

what moral principle should I follow?

who should I marry?

or:

what political arrangement is best?

The organism has information that conceptual awareness may lack.

The conceptual self also has capacities the elementary organismic level lacks:

language,

abstract reasoning,

historical memory,

counterfactual imagination,

long-term planning,

and representations of other people’s interests.

So the useful distinction is not:

true organismic self versus false conceptual self.

It is:

different forms of self-related information operating at different levels.

The Literature Therefore Gives Strong Precedent for Your Observation

What you noticed from organismic values was essentially:

If something can have value relative to the organism, there must be some organised continuity relative to which that value is being assessed.

The literature does not settle what we should call that continuity.

But it repeatedly arrives at something close:

Goldstein’s integrated organism;

Rogers’ organismic experience contrasted with self-concept;

Neisser’s ecological self;

Damasio’s proto-self;

Gallagher and Zahavi’s minimal embodied self;

experimental neuroscience’s bodily self-consciousness;

and enactivism’s organismic autonomy and self-individuation.

These were developed independently and make different theoretical commitments.

Yet they share a broad intuition:

Selfhood may not begin with a person thinking about who they are. A more elementary form of self-related organisation may already exist wherever a living organism distinguishes its own states, regulates its own continuation, acts from its own embodied perspective, and—at least in conscious organisms—experiences the world as happening relative to itself.

That is not one proven definition of an organismic self.

But it means the idea certainly does not arrive in an empty theoretical landscape.

Sources

Goldstein, K. (1939). The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man.
Type: Foundational organismic theory treating the living individual as an integrated whole. Its historical interpretation and relationship to humanistic psychology are reviewed here. (DOI)

Rogers, C. R. (1959). A Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships, as Developed in the Client-Centered Framework. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A Study of a Science, Vol. 3, pp. 184–256.
Type: Primary theoretical source distinguishing organismic experience, self-concept, congruence and incongruence. (BeeLeaf)

Neisser, U. (1988). Five kinds of self-knowledge. Philosophical Psychology, 1(1), 35–59. DOI: 10.1080/09515088808572924.
Type: Foundational theory distinguishing ecological, interpersonal, extended, private and conceptual aspects of self. (Taylor & Francis Online)

Gallagher, S. (2023). Minimal self-consciousness and the flying man argument. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1296656. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1296656.
Type: Contemporary theoretical review of minimal, pre-reflective and bodily selfhood. (Frontiers)

Tsakiris, M., Schütz-Bosbach, S. & Gallagher, S. (2007). On agency and body-ownership: Phenomenological and neurocognitive reflections. Consciousness and Cognition, 16(3), 645–660. DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2007.05.012.
Type: Review of experimental research distinguishing body ownership and agency. (PubMed)

Candia-Rivera, D. et al. (2024). Interoception, network physiology and the emergence of bodily self-awareness. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105864.
Type: Contemporary review linking interoception and network physiology with bodily self-awareness. (PubMed)

Damasio, A. & Damasio, H. (2022). Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness. Brain, 145(7), 2231–2235. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awac194.
Type: Theoretical neurobiological account connecting life regulation, homeostatic feeling and subjectivity. (PubMed)

Damasio, A. & Damasio, H. (2024). Homeostatic feelings and the emergence of consciousness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 36(8), 1653–1659. DOI: 10.1162/jocn_a_02119.
Type: Updated theoretical account of interoception, organismic perspective and consciousness. (PubMed)

Froese, T., Weber, N., Shpurov, I. & Ikegami, T. (2023). From autopoiesis to self-optimization: Toward an enactive model of biological regulation. BioSystems, 230, 104959. DOI: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2023.104959.
Type: Contemporary theoretical work on self-individuation, adaptivity and organismic regulation. (PubMed)

Di Paolo/enactive tradition, reviewed in: The enactive naturalization of normativity: from self-maintenance to situated interactions (2021).
Type: Theoretical treatment of organismic self-maintenance as a foundation for better/worse significance relative to a living identity. (PubMed)

The most striking thing from this literature is that the conceptual self is actually the comparatively late arrival. Biological individuation, bodily perspective, self-regulation, ownership, agency and organism-relative significance all provide candidate forms of selfhood that are more elementary than the explicit human statement: “This is who I think I am.”