Barbara Socor in her book, Conceiving the Self: Presence and Absence in Psychoanalytic Theory, takes us on a detailed journey that questions how the concept of self developed in psychoanalytic theory and changed over time. In exquisite detail, Socor differentiates the understanding of self as being identical with ego, as Freud first postulated, to later concepts of self as separate from ego. Which concept developed first, self or ego, and how these concepts were related to each other, are also reviewed. The self as a structure and as a representation is also discussed, along with a meticulous classification amongst theorists, asking if the concept of self is associated with a sense of what is or whether the sense of self is ultimately dependent on what is absent. As Socor relates: is the self best conceptualized by experiencing what is achieved and realized, or is it best experienced through the intangible? Finally, Socor ponders the question of how we understand the relationship between the objective nonself (the object), and the subjective self.