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The terms ‘self representation’ and ‘object representation’ have become so familiar that we rarely think about their origins. We assume without questioning that ‘object representation’ comes from Freud whereas we tend to connect the term ‘self representation’ with the name of Heinz Hartmann. Once we examine the history of both terms, we come across interesting connections, for example, to the paradigm change that was triggered by Freud's The Ego and the Id (1923). At the same time a developmental line in the history of theory becomes visible here, a line that began in Berlin in the 1920s, from where it migrated to the USA during the war and in the postwar period, continuing to the present.2 This development is the subject of this paper.
To the best of my knowledge, Freud does not use the term Objektrepräsentanz - the German source for ‘object representation’ - anywhere in his work. This term occurs neither in the index of his Gesammelte Werke nor in Guttmann's Konkordanz (1995), which lists in alphabetical order all words that Freud used in the Gesammelte Werke.3 This surprising discovery also