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The boundary between the ego (in the sense of the I) and the rest of the personality, often loosely called the Self but here called the not-I, is of course neither a fixed nor a stable one. A part of the personality which is identified with the ego or I one day may be identified with someone else and repudiated the next. What possesses the I now may be unconscious in a minute's time, and moreover this is all part of normal, efficient mental functioning.
The same kind of migration of the I may occur in relation to the body and the parts of the body. A part of the body may be I one minute, not-I the next, loved child one day, hated persecutor the next, and so on. The focus here is on the I and the body as they are subjectively experienced, rather than as the theoretically conceived ego or the anatomical body or its parts.
The I may be an embodied, a dis-embodied, or an out-of-body I, or part of a semi-mystical merger between I and body. Sometimes the body, or the openings into the body, may be experienced as a gateway between I and not-I, for example a gateway into the unconscious. Often the body image or its parts are experienced as containing or devouring mother, as will be seen below.