The starting point of the paper (and it’s first part) is ‘language’ because the word “self” traces back tothe roots of Indo-Germanic languages and after all we know from research it is basedon the pronominal stem “se-“. Grammatically it is a so-called “strong genitive” which means it links together as closely as possible a subject and an object in one single expression, the ‘same of the same’, so to say: it is the strongest and shortest linguistic form for “reflexivity”. Whenever the word is used we can say that a given problem of identity has been increased to the utmost possible. Nevertheless this radical sharpening of subjectivity is far away from being merely a rational or cognitive phenomenon as it tends to be always embedded in strong affect and emotion. This increase of self-reference can be observed linguistically looking at the so-called “emphatic pronouns” as well as the “ethic or pleonastic dative”. In each case we will end up with the same result: the simple seeming word “self” expresses the unity of a difference as it allows to combine emotional emphasis and rational reflection or, more precisely speaking it is the utmost condensed linguistic form of affectively grounded reflexivity. No wonder that in modern philosophy the “idea of the SELF” has become one of the main topics though, as Seigel (2005:3) put it “few ideas are both as weighty as slippery as the notion of the self”.

It is a well-known systematic problem of educational theory all over Europe to define and demarcate clearly the identity of professional educational roles. In the second part of the paper the author mainly outlines three basic problems: the "taboo-problem" following Adorno (1), the "attribution-problem" following assumptions deriving from modern social psychology (2) and the "biography-problem" following assumptions from own research (Kraft 2009). The "taboo-problem" refers to manifold more or less explicit prejudices educational professions are confronted with; the "attribution-problem" refers to the structural difficulty that the results of educational efforts seem to disappear into the educated children, pupils or clients itself - and therefore it is difficult to make clear attributions about the efficiency of educational work; the "biography-problem" finally refers to a theorem given by Bernfeld saying that each educationalist always has to handle at least two children: the own inner child he or she was at former times (the child within so to say) and the child in front of him or her - these two children sometimes may come into severe conflict with each other. In other words: These three factors have a special tendency to reinforce each other and thereby undermine the feeling of professional self-confidence.

In the third part of the paper the author will end up with a suggestion to cope with these difficulties mainly in demonstrating what is in the centre of the educational task: the transformation of life-problems into learning-problems! Understanding education as a special kind of such transformation-work finally leads to what may be called the pointing-structure of education.

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