Cultural forms and practices of staging and optimizing the self play a prominent role in everyday life and lifestyle today: The numerous changes and manipulations of body and mind demonstrate that hardly anything is exempt from the work on the self. In this context, the self appears both in a position of control and in a position of unrestricted availability to shifting demands and profiles of requirements. How can this ambivalence of self-creation and self-discipline in the work on the self be interpreted? How does this relate to current (educational) practices and procedures for staging and optimizing the self? And where are the boundaries of the self? The contributions in this volume address these questions from an analytical and theoretical perspective and reconstruct, in various cultural fields, the impossible task of being a self.