The Effects of Distortions of the Self: A Study of The Picture of Dorian Gray

It is a universal social assumption that every person has a self, that each person is a center of motivation, action, and perception uniquely patterned to suit the interactions between his needs, fears, aspirations, and the experience of reality. The term “self” is commonly used to denote that for which a person can he held responsible—responsible to others and responsible to himself. Responsibility has traditionally been tied to awareness, and it can fairly be said, I think, that the mechanisms of defense function in order to limit awareness and therefore the experience of responsibility. Much of the resistance to Freud's theory of unconscious motivation was caused by the fact that he broke this tie to consciousness and thereby expanded the scope of individual responsibility.

Hartmann (1950), for one, pointed out that Freud used the term “ego” to refer to both a grouping of specific functions and a more experience-near phenomenon—namely, the self. The study of the self within psychoanalysis has come under intense scrutiny as a result of investigations into disorders of character and the vicissitudes of narcissism, e.g., Winnicott (1960), Khan (1974), Kohut (1971, 1977), Giovacchini (1975). Kohut has written about the development of the self in terms of its origins within the mirroring reflections of the empathic parent—the attempts to accurately reflect aspects of the infant's developing self so that they can be differentially