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1. The self […] is a content of the mental apparatus but is not one of its constituents, i.e., not one of the agencies of the mind […]. It is a structure within the mind since it is cathected with instinctual energy and it has continuity in time, i.e., it is enduring (1971, XV).
1.1 The notions of self, on the one hand, of ego, superego, id, on the other, as well as those of personality and identity, are abstractions which belong to different levels of concept formation. Ego, id, and superego are the constituents of a specific, high-level, i.e., experience-distant, abstraction in psychoanalysis: the psychic apparatus (1971, XIV). The concepts of a self and of a self-object refer to inner experiences, that they are not part of physical reality but of psychological reality (1984, 50).
1.2 Various - and frequently inconsistent - self representations are present not only in the id, the ego, and the superego, but also within a single agency of the mind. There may, for example, exist contradictory conscious and preconscious self representations - e.g., of grandiosity and inferiority - side by side, occupying either delimited loci within the realm of the ego sectorial positions of that realm of the psyche in which id and ego form a continuum (1971, XV).
1.3 Some of the most intense narcissistic experiences relate to objects; objects, that is, which are either used in the service of the self and of the maintenance of its instinctual investment, or objects which are themselves experienced as part of the self. I shall refer to the latter as self-objects (1971, XIV).