Article begins This past fall I returned to Princeton after three years of retirement to teach eighteen-year-olds about the self. My colleagues were consumed by one question: how do you stop students from using AI to write their essays? The seminar turned out to be one of the best I have taught in thirty-five years.  The course was a First-Year Seminar on the formation and transformation of the self, drawing on original texts in anthropology and psychoanalysis. My aim was to develop what I call people skills—not the measurable skills specific to technical puzzles or professional roles, but the capacity to understand oneself and others with honesty and depth. I had taught versions of this course before, to both graduate and undergraduate students. Each time, I saw my task as facilitating the development of voice, interpersonal skill, and emotional intelligence: empathy in communication, cross-cultural respect, and above all how to access the subjective element of the self—what makes us who we are.…