Introduction and Historical Overview

The task of analysis can be to establish a sense of being…. It is possible for human beings to have a delusional sense of being … to exist in psychic spaces that are cut off from genuine awareness of their inner core … [and] to remain unconnected to their inner life, the unconscious and its generative resources…. Such living is superficial and often contributes to states of claustrophobia, preoccupation with self-image, and acting out of archaic relationships to the body…. [It can also function] to limit and block the symbol making capacities of mental life. [M. Milner, 1950, p. 479]

Self-awareness, self-experience, aliveness—where do these ideas fit into our psychoanalytic models? What do Freudians and Kleinians have to say about the experience of self and the concept of selfhood? Is it possible that some major psychoanalytic theories have yet to conceptualize fully such an important concept? This journal is an attempt to draw together researchers and clinicians to explore what they have been thinking in this vital area. As Allan Shore has pointed out, “Each separate discipline [has often maintained] a split-off developmental branch, and the transfer of information between these bodies of knowledge, especially at different levels of analysis, has been restricted.… An integration of the findings of many related fields is essential to the ultimate creation of a heuristic model of development” (, p. 4). One of the problems for psychoanalysis is that researchers, clinicians, and theoreticians do not listen to each other and are all too ready to assume that the work in adjacent fields is not relevant to their own. For example, could anyone guess who wrote the following passage? “Observations on infants leave little doubt that the child very early begins to perceive, to respond to, and to imitate the gestures, the inflections of voice and other visible and audible affective manifestations of the mother. I have