Commentary by Jorge L. Ahumada

A comment on Dr. Milrod's paper “The Concept of the Self and Self Representation” must take into account its central purpose, in his words: “to build a fragile bridge of understanding” between two different fields of endeavor, the neurosciences and psychoanalysis. It is no surprise that the term self does not have the same sense in the neurosciences and in psychoanalysis, or indeed for each neuroscientist and each psychoanalyst. The issue can be tracked centuries back to the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, where Descartes responded to his undisclosed interlocutor, Michel de Montaigne; Ego cogito ergo sum, probably the most famous sentence in history of philosophy, installs deductive reason at the center of knowledge and at the center of the “I”, and it establishes an ontological break between the self as a disembodied self transparent ego, and the purportedly purely mechanical nature of our own bodies—not to speak of the purely mechanical status of speechless animals. Priorizing the unreliability of the senses, and assuming the (mechanical-like) generality and immutability of “laws of nature”, pure deduction from God-warranted first principles gained the upper hand over detailed observation. Variants of the Cartesian program have been vastly successful in the exact sciences, and presently in the technosciences shaping the age.

The above leads to two lines of comment. Firstly, that the term “ego” has, before its use as a psychoanalytic term, a long and central history in philosophy, where it tends to be synonymous with the term “self”. Freud uses the two sides of the term: in his more “theoretical” papers, it will tend more to being a “dynamic structure”, interacting with those other structures, the Id and the superego; but at no time it fully departs from its more conventional connotation of a personal “self”. And thus, Janus-like, it partakes of the “mechanistic” and the individually personal. Secondly that, as noted somewhere by Charles Peirce, we human being