The Self in Psychoanalysis*

The theme of this paper is such an extensive one that it obliges me to be selective, although the choice is not easy. In the first place it seems to me that I must avoid giving a predominantly historical cast to what I am going to say, and yet I think I have to give a brief idea of how interest in the Self arose in psychoanalysis. I think I should say as much as I can about the scientific value of the subject but, here too, the task is not a comfortable one. We have by now witnessed various ways of conceptualising the Self in the psychoanalytic sphere, and one premise for this paper might be to give an overview of the colourful terrain these tendencies have occupied. I have refrained from going in that direction, recalling two middle-aged American ladies on an airliner, one sitting by the window and leaning to look down, the other standing beside her with a guide book in her hand, from which she was reading that what was down there – Florence – was a very important city rich in monuments.

So I am preparing myself to talk about the Self, avoiding panoramic views, and naturally keeping in mind the limits imposed by the time available to me. So I will keep historical references to an essential minimum and try instead to give the briefest and most pertinent possible clinical illustrations.

I have recently had occasion to note that while the processes which differentiate mental functioning from the body proceed from body to mind, psychoanalysis has conducted its research in the opposite direction, from the mind to the body. Naturally, this has not happened by chance. Freud had gained his scientific education in that golden age of the development of German neurophysiology, which occupied the second half of the nineteenth century: a development which had, however, reached its limit when it tried to investigate mental activity in neurophysiological terms. Freud himself made an extreme attempt along these lines with his famous Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), broken