We differentiate ourselves from the object before having a sense of our personal identity. Once acquired, this sense is almost never in doubt. Where does this certainty come from ? Freud attributes it to the ego. Hartmann attributes it to the self and to the process of ego maturation. Winnicott to what he calls “being”. The notion of “internal archives of identifications” proposed by Hélène Suarez Labat provides a better solution to this problem. These archives are constituted by the systems of memory traces described by Freud.