The False Self occupies a foundational position in object-relations depth psychology, originating in Winnicott’s 1960 formulation and radiating outward into clinical, Buddhist-psychotherapeutic, Jungian, and addiction-recovery frameworks. Winnicott’s contribution is irreducibly structural: the False Self arises when the mother fails to meet the infant’s spontaneous gesture, substituting her own agenda for the child’s nascent subjectivity. The result is a layered defensive organization—not a single pathology but a spectrum, ranging from a False Self that wholly masquerades as real to one that covertly searches for conditions safe enough to permit True Self emergence. What distinguishes this from ordinary social adaptation is the ontological cost: the False Self produces a felt sense of unreality and futility even amid social success. Kalsched extends Winnicott’s schema into trauma theory, locating the False Self as the ‘progressed,’ mentally organized part of a split psychosomatic whole. Flores and Epstein carry the concept into clinical application with addicted and narcissistically wounded populations. Epstein places it in productive tension with Buddhist no-self teaching, arguing that the very search for a ‘true self’ in therapy can repeat the narcissistic error. Berger, writing in a recovery register, frames the false self/true self dialectic as the psychological crux of emotional sobriety. Schoen extends the concept into Jungian archetypal territory, linking identification with the false self to susceptibility to addiction as a ‘false god.’ The central tension across the corpus is whether the True Self is a recoverable developmental birthright or, in the Buddhist reading, itself a further construction.