Evolution of self identity: listener question / comment

I have a question after hearing the last Home webinar, which I could not attend in person. 

You spoke about the conceptual mind as a gift, the only problem being that it makes a concept of self. But as I understand it at the moment, to build a concept of self is inevitable in the developmental phase. There is a time where the child just realizes it is a separate entity somehow and we call this I. 

So if this is the problem, why is it built into our evolutionary design? Or is it only in our culture, where the I is so worshipped, that this happens, and in a society, where people would not give such an example the I wouldn’t develop? 

But even if, obviously the overall evolution favours the development of an I. There is a philosopher Jean Gebser who has a model of the evolution of awareness (he calls it mutation of awareness), where he shows we started with an archaic awareness where there was no sense of I at all and evolved over the magic and mythical state to the current mental state, the culmination of separation where the I sees itself as always facing a Not-I. He also says that we will move to the integral awareness, where we will combine all the previous states and can access them simultaneously. It seems the evolution leads us to the formation of a separate I.

If this concept of self is the problem, why is it inevitable? It seems to me either the design is flawed and sets us up for suffering, and again, why would it be like that, or I don’t see something. I bet it’s the last one.

Can you shed a light on this topic please?