Being/Having an American Transcendental Self

Much googling and reading of Baumeister & Cie. on the peculiarly North American Self.  As Pascal said God says, "Tu ne me chercherais pas, si tu ne m'avais pas déja trouvé."  As usual, I don't find everything that Baumeister says of the same worthwhileness, but his re-discovery of "Will-Power", and his generally adequate notion of what the Self (at least among North Americans) is, and what it does, are, I daresay, of timeless significance--worthy of place alongside such lights as Plato/Socrates, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Emerson, Nietzsche/Thoreau, Proust, Henry James.  I just throw Henry James in there, because it seems to me that he does (much more than his brother--an understanding forced upon him, as I believe, by his ineluctable gayness) have an appreciation of the inner workings and apperceptions of the Self, that only, maybe, Mark Twain (specifically, in his author's soliloquies on the deliberations of Tom Sawyer's and Huckleberry Finn's consciences) ever equaled in American letters--funny, and instructive, how mutually antipathetic James and Twain found one another, considering their very similar notions of (essentially male) psychology:  'Twas, I expect, the age-old, half-in-the-shadow, Shakespearean/Marlovian dichotomy between basically straight and basically gay mentalities.