The self-actualization trap
Nice critique. I'd put it that the actual self (Self) is just (?) a conglemeration of physical and mental drives and capacities, and instantiations thereof, such as thoughts, moods, and behaviours, with any more or less temporally stable subset of the above being what we refer to as a personality. And the self-reflexive mode of the personality then being the folk sense of self, or ego etc. And it's that on which theories like Maslow's self-actualization rest. So, it's scientific clothes obscure ideological underpinnings. It's not just that the theory presumes a false premise (folk self = Self), but that it aims to recreate the basis of the false premise: Those who seek self-actualization are those strongly reinforcing the folk notion of self. So, the theory functions as a mechanism (one of many) for social reproduction. And that hints at the missing piece in the puzzle of the first sentence
"the actual self is "just" a conglemeration of physical and mental drives and capacities, and instantiations thereof, such as thoughts, moods, and behaviours"
None of which is coherent except in a socio-linguistic context, which is a social super-organism that like its physical counterparts blindly acts to reproduce itself, and needs folk selves to do so.
Of course, you need to play the game anyway, just with an eye to its absurdity. You can never be "the actual self" because it is exactly that which lies outside the bounds of the type of localized coherence which forms your folk self. True actualization would be a form of insanity, a separation from mother social super-organism. Just the opposite to fake Maslow self-actualization (a marrying to one of its narrow instantiations—your dream "role", whatever).