The paper addresses the paradox of the indispensability, from the very beginning of psychic life, of the relation with an object so that the individual can become him/herself, a relation in which identification is the earliest form of bond, and, on the other hand, the isolation that the core self needs to feel alive and have a sense of the real. The core self was theorized by Winnicott as a sacred inaccessible nucleus that should not become altered through contact with not-me objects. The question is: “how to be isolated without having to be insulated”? A clinical example is put forward to illustrate a path of respect for this psychic area that not even the analyst has access to, and which constitutes the “sacred” experience of the analysis, directed towards fostering identifications that are neither adaptive nor altering, but creative and productive. Unfinished and being continuously potentially creatively developed.

KEY WORDS: identification, core self, true and false self, psychoanalytic process, rêverie.