False Self

The false self is D. W. Winnicott’s term — introduced in the 1960 paper “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self” and elaborated in [[winnicott-maturational-processes|The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment]] — for the adaptive self-organization that develops when the infant’s spontaneous gestures are met with environmental demand rather than environmental responsiveness, and the true self goes into hiding behind a compliant surface that organizes the relation to the world.

Though developed within object-relations psychoanalysis rather than analytical psychology, the concept sits close to Jung’s persona — the socially negotiated face by which the individual appears — and more specifically to the pathology of persona identification, in which the ego mistakes its persona for its self. The difference is one of register and pathogenesis: Winnicott locates the origin of the false self in the failure of maternal attunement in infancy; Jung locates persona-identification in the one-sided demand of the collective on the adult. The clinical phenomenology overlaps. See persona and primary-self.

Relationships

• persona
• persona-identification
• winnicott-maturational-processes