This paper has stressed the importance of maintaining intact self representations and thereby the corresponding self experience or cohesive sense of self in terms of the metapsychology and treatment of the severe borderline disturbances. A partial schematic review of the psychoanalytic theory of internalized object relations is undertaken as a vehicle to explore some of the therapeutic problems involved in the loss of the self experience from disintegration of the self representations. Also considered are some problems of altering technique resulting from the condensation of oedipal and pre-oedipal fantasies, in association with an ego regression into the realm of the representational world. Likewise, primitive self-protective 'defences' involving depersonalization are discussed, as well as elaborating the concept of inner-outer congruence as related to the integrity of the self representations and thus the sense of self.