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Before the conference we sent a number of questions to the participants and invited them to choose, according to their area of expertise, which questions to answer.
Question One: What is your definition of the self? Do you find the concept of the self helpful theoretically and/or clinically? How might one differentiate the self from the ego, or from the identity? What are the clinical implications of these distinctions? Where should we look when we assess the emergence of a sense of self? And might it not profit us to revisit even that phrase “sense of self”?
The place of the self in psychoanalytic theory and practice has always been something of a puzzle. For those of us who were trained almost forty years ago, hardly anybody at all had a self. To be more exact, most patients had egos, which varied on a dimension from weak to strong, but hardly any of them had selves. Today by contrast, if I can believe what my patients and students tell me, most people have selves that vary on a dimension from true to false, but hardly any of them have egos. Are we simply witnessing a passing change in fashion, like rising hemlines, tango fever, or tulipomania—or are we learning something substantially new about human nature? A review of the literature on the psychoanalytic self reveals little agreement about what the self is, where it belongs in theory, or what difference, if any, it makes in practice. So I approach the subject with a certain mixture of temerity and trepidation.