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This article actually describes my experience of reality pretty well.  "Self," as the dictionary definition you pulled shows, is kind of a bad/confusing word to use, I think, because it's a word that describes the umbrella that shelters all these unruly, competing desires, many of which don't seem sophisticated enough to be called "selves" themselves.  Still, it seems right to say that we are each more a plurality than a central authority on guard against distracting, id-identified intruding impulses.  What do other people think?  Think about how we feel when we screw something up.  I don't often have the experience of being able to identify a kind of Sunday-schoolish sense of right and wrong when faced with a decision, or even a sense of having done the "wrong" thing within the narrow context of my own life.  Our decisions always feel like good ideas to our dominant "selves" at the time.  I think the author has a kind of mania for categorization that overcomplicates what he's trying to say though.  I don't identify with "cursing the lazy bastard who didn't set the coffee timer the night before," because since it's all us, I think we'll treat all of our selves with infinite compassion and understanding, whether we really deserve it or not.  That's what holds us together as a single coherent personality. I think we can think of ourselves as a bundle of competing desires without adopting Sybil as a model of consciousness (awesomely bad movie I highly recommend).  It might be healthier to just let our concept of self become a little more capacious.  When I "regret" something, I'm not blaming someone else.  I'm ashamed if it's serious, or if it's a silly, minor, transgression maybe I'm amused, kind of humbled to realize that, yes, there's some impetuosity in my personality as well.  It seems bizarre to want to call all of these different impulses "selves," though, as if there's always the impetuous one over here and always the reflective one over here.  And I agree with you, Emily, that the "selves" are intimately connected, set up to help each other out, balance one another, or sometimes in a sort of self-sabotaging structure, but always in a more complicated relationship than just competing.