Self

The spontaneous gesture is the True Self in action. Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real. Whereas a True Self feels real, the existence of a False Self results in a feeling unreal or a sense of futility.

Winnicott locates the True Self in the spontaneous, body-rooted gesture and identifies creativity and the sense of reality as its exclusive prerogatives, setting the foundational distinction that governs all subsequent true-self/false-self discourse.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The idealized image becomes an idealized self. And this idealized self becomes more real to him than his real self, not primarily because it is more appealing but because it answers all his stringent needs.

Horney argues that neurosis pivots on the moment the idealized image usurps the real self as the subject’s operative center of gravity, a displacement she treats as the nucleus of all neurotic development.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

a split starts to open up between the infant’s psychosomatic ‘true’ self and a (primarily mental) ‘false’ self that is precociously organized to screen the true self from further trauma and to act as a substitute for the environment which has become unbearable.

Kalsched synthesizes Winnicott’s true/false-self split with his own concept of the self-care system, framing the false self as a traumatically necessitated defensive substitute for an inadequate environment.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

At one extreme: the False Self sets up as real and it is this that observers tend to think is the real person. In living relationships, work relationships, and friendships, however, the False Self begins to fail.

Winnicott provides a developmental taxonomy of False Self organizations, from those that fully impersonate personhood to those that function as guardians searching for conditions safe enough for the True Self to emerge.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the neurotic’s idealized image did not merely constitute a false belief in his value and significance; it was rather like the creation of a Frankenstein monster which in time usurped his best energies… he was no longer interested in realistically tackling or outgrowing his difficulties… but was bent on actualizing his idealized self.

Horney recasts the idealized self not as a benign aspiration but as a parasitic structure that progressively colonizes the energy that belongs to genuine self-realization.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the True Self does not become a living reality except as a result of the mother’s repeated success in meeting the infant’s spontaneous gesture or sensory hallucination.

Winnicott grounds the ontogenesis of the True Self entirely in the quality of maternal mirroring, making relational adequacy the necessary condition for authentic selfhood.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

For me the real self is the spring of emotional forces, of constructive energies, of directive and judiciary powers.

Horney explicitly differentiates her concept of the real self from Freud’s ego by assigning it an inherent motivational and generative vitality rather than a merely executive or adaptive function.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Our true-self, which longed to break free of the constraints, was lost in the twisted perfect self we thought we were creating… Recovery helped us release our true-self.

Berger applies the Horneyan true/idealized-self dialectic to addiction recovery, framing sobriety as a process of dismantling the idealized-self and restoring access to the real self.

Berger, Allen, 12 Smart Things to Do When the Booze and Drugs Are Gone: Choosing Emotional Sobriety through Self-Awareness and Right Action, 2010thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

When asked the ultimate narcissistic question by another follower—‘What is the nature of the self?’—the Buddha responded that there is neither self nor no-self. The question, itself, was flawed.

Epstein imports the Buddhist deconstruction of the self as an entity into clinical psychotherapy, arguing that patients’ demands for a ‘true self’ may themselves rest on a category error.

Epstein, Mark, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

For Jung, the self involved all possibilities, positive and negative, spiritual and instinctive… ‘the self is the centre of the individual’s psychological universe’… not knowable in essence.

Samuels contrasts the Jungian Self—a paradoxical totality encompassing light and shadow, ultimately unknowable by introspection—with Kohut’s more optimistic, empathy-centered self-psychology.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Analysis does not start until the nurse has left the child with the analyst, and the child has become able to remain alone with the analyst and has started to play.

Winnicott maps the analytic task onto the true/false-self distinction, insisting that genuine therapeutic contact can only begin when the analyst reaches past the false-self compliance to the more vulnerable true self.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the self consequently becomes assimilated to the ego. Although this is the exact opposite of the process we have just described it is followed by the same result: inflation.

Jung identifies ego-inflation as the symmetrical counterpart to ego-dissolution, both representing failures to maintain the proper relationship between the ego and the superordinate Self.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In psychiatric terms we call it the ‘alienation from self.’ This latter term is applied chiefly to those extreme conditions in which people lose their feeling of identity, as in amnesias and depersonalizations.

Horney traces alienation from self across a spectrum from subtle neurotic fog to frank depersonalization, arguing that all such states share a common structure of self-estrangement initiated by the neurotic process.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

That the Self is an autonomous agent of change, of transformation, whose telos is its own fullest realization, I have no doubt. Yet those changes and teleologies may have virtually nothing to do with the self-ratifying desires of the ego.

Hollis articulates the Jungian position that the Self operates as a teleological force independent of, and often opposed to, the ego’s conscious agenda.

Hollis, James, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

If we are encouraged to develop according to our real-self, we differentiate. If we continue to unfold in this manner, we will evolve into the person we were meant to be.

Drawing on Bowen’s differentiation theory, Berger equates development of the real self with psychological maturation, framing a solid sense of self as the outcome of differentiation from the undifferentiated relational field.

Berger, Allen, 12 Smart Things to Do When the Booze and Drugs Are Gone: Choosing Emotional Sobriety through Self-Awareness and Right Action, 2010supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the central ego-self around which most people’s lives revolve is at best an early stage of development, rather than an ultimate, indispensable organizing principle of consciousness… Ego is a pretender to the throne.

Welwood argues from a transpersonal vantage that Western depth psychology errs in reifying the ego-self as a terminus, when it is better understood as a provisional developmental stage to be transcended.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

communication so easily becomes linked with some degree of false or compliant object-relating; silent or secret communication with subjective objects, carrying a sense of real, must periodically take over to restore balance.

Winnicott extends the true/false-self polarity into communication theory, arguing that even in health the true self periodically requires withdrawal into silence to preserve its integrity against the compliant demands of social relatedness.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

What most people mean by self is defined by what Jung called the ego or consciousness. It is a conscious sense of oneself, of who one is, which is based on the above-mentioned sense of having a physical body and continuous memory.

Sedgwick distinguishes lay usage of ‘self’—equated with ego and conscious continuity—from the Jungian technical meaning, flagging a recurrent terminological ambiguity in the clinical literature.

Sedgwick, David, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship, 2001supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The actual self becomes the offensive stranger to whom the idealized self happens to be tied, and the latter turns against this stranger with hate and contempt. The actual self becomes the victim of the proud idealized self.

Horney traces the structural origins of self-hate to the splitting of the personality into idealized and actual selves, in which the latter becomes the object of contempt directed by the former.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The marriage quaternio provides a schema not only for the self but also for the structure of primitive society with its cross-cousin marriage, marriage classes, and division of settlements into quarters.

Jung situates the Self within a quaternary archetypal schema that bridges individual individuation and collective cultural structures, underscoring its status as a transpersonal as well as personal principle.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the consciously constructed although variable, fragile, and defensive self that shakily pilots us through the alternatives of living consciously.

Jaynes offers a historicized, constructivist account of the self as a relatively recent cultural achievement rather than a natural given, contrasting the defended conscious self with the more stable but shallower identity-markers of bicameral minds.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

As the appetite-based self loses its strength, one’s inner sense of aliveness or vitality seems to expand.

Epstein argues, via Buddhist psychology, that relinquishing the craving-organized self paradoxically yields an expansion of aliveness, countering the assumption that selfhood and vitality are co-extensive.

Epstein, Mark, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

These thoughts get compounded with the imagined dangers of crossing over to the side of embodied self-awareness (chaotic uncertainty, fear of feeling our ‘true’ selves).

Fogel identifies embodied self-awareness as the somatic substrate of authentic selfhood and traces how conceptual self-regulation becomes a defensive substitute that forecloses access to it.

Fogel, Alan, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the attestation that is indeed of the self has an effect, in turn, upon analysis itself and shields it from the accusation of being limited, because of its linguistic constitution, to the explicitation of idioms.

Ricoeur argues that a hermeneutically grounded attestation of selfhood—narrative identity—both draws on and corrects the analytic philosophical tradition’s tendency to reduce the self to linguistic or logical criteria.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

12 Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self (1960) One recent development in psycho-analysis has been the increasing use of the concept of the False Self. This concept carries with it the idea of a True Self. History This concept is not in itself new.

Winnicott signals that the true/false-self distinction has pre-analytic antecedents, locating his own contribution within a longer intellectual history rather than claiming sole origination.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Because the creation of the idealized self is possible only at the expense of truth about himself, its actualization requires further distortions of truth, imagination being a willing servant to this end.

Horney articulates the epistemological cost of idealized-self formation: the systematic distortion of self-knowledge, with imagination pressed into service as enabler of the illusion.

Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →