# The Self and the SESMET **Opening (not a real abstract):** The Self and the SESMET I: Introduction I am most grateful to all those who commented on ‘“The Self”’. The result was a festival of misunderstanding, but misunderstanding is one of the great engines of progress. Few of the contributors to the symposium on ‘Models of the Self’ were interested in my project: some (like Olson and Wilkes) were already highly sceptical about the value of talk about the self, others were committed to other projects centred on the word ‘self’ that made mine seem irrelevant at best and many worse things besides. Large differences in methodological and terminological habits gave rise to many occasions on which commentators thought they disagreed with me although they had in fact changed the subject. So I am not sure anyone found my paper useful. But I found some of the responses extremely useful, especially those that adverted **Authors:** [[I: Introduction]]