Your idea of 'self' - always develops under the ever-watchful eyes of normalizing institutions.

As Foucault the 'self' has been confused with theologies of the soul—concupiscence, sin, and the fall from grace.

The hermeneutics (that science of interpretation) of the self has been confused with theologies of the soul.

 The technique of confession, central even to secular psychoanalysis, informs a subjectivity that, for Foucault, always develops under the ever-watchful eyes of normalizing institutions. 

What is required is a counterpoint to the culture of religious confessional and Freudian subjectivities.

What is that counterpoint?

A realisation that the self is  a correlate of the technologies of self that it co-evolves with over millennium.