The Experience of Self—Aspects of its Formation, Expansion, and Vulnerability

IN THIS PAPER I SHALL DISCUSS THE EXPERIENCE OF SELF—ITS contents and how they get to be experienced as part of "my self." In one of the earlier psychoanalytic papers on the self, Spiegel (1959) pointed out that "Self-feeling is an ultimate, not further describable, clinical fact, but the self is not a clinical fact in the same sense that self-feeling is. It is a conceptualization or construct which we invoke to clarify clinical phenomena" (p. 87). Several authors have explored the concept of self (as well as self-feeling) (e.g., Spiegel, 1959); (Sandler and Rosenblatt, 1962); (Jacobson, 1964); (Lichtenstein, 1965); (Klein, 1976). My focus will be entirely on self-feeling.

Dealing with processes (how experiences get into the self, and not only the contents), and with the preverbal period at least in part, I shall of necessity be inferential in my approach, but I shall try to draw a picture that is consistent with developmental processes that we have come to understand through clinical psychoanalysis and through child observation.

For the most part, I shall be discussing that area of experience of which the person feels a sense of ownership, responsibility, and/or familiarity—the "I" or the "me" as the source of