To conquer Oneself bargains a unique retelling of the emergence of the Western suggestion of "modern self," demonstrating how the fight to forge a self was once enmeshed in early sleek Catholic missionary enlargement. interpreting the practices of Catholics in Europe and New Spain from the 1520s throughout the 1760s, the ebook treats Jesuit concepts of self-formation, particularly non secular routines and confessional practices, and the relationships among non secular administrators and their topics. Catholics on either side of the Atlantic have been folded right into a dynamic that formed new techniques of self and, within the strategy, fueled the worldwide Catholic missionary move. Molina historicizes Jesuit meditation and narrative self-reflection as modes of self-formation that will eventually give a contribution to a brand new knowing of faith as anything deepest and private, thereby overturning long-held innovations of personhood, time, house, and social truth. To conquer Oneself demonstrates that it was once via embodied procedures that people have come to event themselves as cut up into brain and physique. although the self-congratulatory position assigned to "consciousness" within the Western highbrow culture, early moderns didn't think themselves into considering selves. really, "the self" was once solid from embodied efforts to go beyond self. but regardless of a discourse that situates self as inside, the particular gasoline for endured self-transformation required an object-cum-subject—someone else to rework. consistent questions in the course of the ebook are: Why does the hassle to grasp and go beyond self require such a lot of others? And what do we know about the inherent intersubjectivity of missionary colonialism?