The word 自我 is formed through a conceptual fusion where 自 (zì), meaning "self" or "from", acts as a prefix that turns the following character 我 (wǒ), meaning "I" or "me", inward upon itself. This combination creates a reflexive and philosophical construct of "the self", where 自 implies a sense of origin or inward direction, modifying 我 to represent not just the personal pronoun, but the abstract entity of one's own identity, consciousness, or ego, effectively meaning "the self of me" or "selfhood". It is a compound that builds a higher-order concept from two simpler, related notions of identity.