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THE OPULENT PROFUSION OF ANALYTIC THOUGHT and scholarship in this group of papers on "Theories of the Self and Psychoanalytic Concepts" stimulated reflection and commentary/about the subject itself, the relevance of the topic to contemporary psychoanalytic controversy, and some lines of development and areas of confusion concerning definition, boundaries, and relations between theories of the self and psychoanalytic theory.
Whatever the self is is not self-evident. The concepts vary tremendously; they involve different frames of reference and different levels of discourse. They range from the colloquial mode of speech when we talk phenomenologically, e.g., about self-awareness or self-criticism, all the way to highly abstract metapsychological constructions. They range from academic psychology to psychoanalysis, and as surveyed by Ticho (1982), to different schools of thought surrounding psychoanalysis. They go back to controversies that have been with us for a very long time.
Kernberg (1982) differentially elaborated Freud's term, das