 To summarize, we can best understand Stein’s theory of autonomous personal agency, and indeed her overall analysis of persons, if we appreciate one of the leitmotifs running through her whole early phenomenological work: the view that experiences can be more or less “close” to their very anchoring, namely their egoic or personal core. The idea is that experiential states of whatever sort (including beliefs, emotions, volitions, cognitive states, etc.) can impact the self. In turn, their initiation and their course are impacted more or less by egoic activity, depending on how much spontaneous engagement and control the I exerts, or is able to exert, on them (see  sect. 2.2).