“Essentially, we have no ability to change our bodies in the slightest. We accept them as they are, no matter how surgeries, aesthetic interventions, and life's misfortunes may leave indelible marks. In other words, there is an invisible contract between our consciousness and the corporeal existence that proves to be fate, a private destiny, and an immutable puzzle.

Moreover, it is a beautiful complex that quickly engrafts into the psyche, identifying with it and ultimately resulting in a sum without addition. Any mental state is projected onto the physicality with the well-known ambivalent symptoms. The young person who appears in the gathering has erythrophobia, turning beet-red from his embarrassment, almost trembling as he avoids looking at those present. What do we read then on his face?”

Kostis Papayiorgis's dedication to “how we can think about the self” is evident from his early inquiries, becoming apparent or lurking in many of his books, peaking in his last grand yet unfinished work, titled The Self.

This edition memorializes an ending that remains incomplete—an agonizing study in progress that guides us into the antechamber of the relationship with the “self,” in the cohabitation with the body. Papayiorgis's long-standing and continuous engagement with the self is confirmed by two unpublished, primitive texts from the 1970s, which are included in the appendix of the book along with two early drafts of the current study, as well as a literary-inspired treatise on the dichotomy of “I-you.”