Recent neuroscientific studies of self-awareness have focused on how the self compares to representations of other people, on the ability to represent and attribute mental states, and on the ability to represent how the external world would appear from other viewpoints. Social cognitive neuroscience tends to emphasize the shared properties of self and others across several dimensions, such as the shared properties of actions, bodies and sensations, rather than the asymmetries between self and other. In the present chapter, we put forward the hypothesis that the experience and representation of one's own body may underpin the distinction between the self and other agents. In every inter-action, there are both private and public states and signals represented in the brain of the agent and the observer. Private signals refer to centrally generated action representations such as intentions, efferent signals (e.g. efference copy, motor commands), and re-afferent signals such as proprioception. Public signals originate from observable sensory events, both re-afferent and ex-afferent, such as visual and auditory signals that may refer to bodies, objects or complex patterns of motor behaviour. How are these signals used to disambiguate the identity of bodies and the origin of actions? By focusing on recent experiments on self-recognition, we propose that the experience of one's actions, which depends largely on the processing of efferent information, may function as a unifying element that structures a coherent representation of the bodily self, as distinct from the other agents.