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Leon and Rebeca Grinberg (1971), from Argentina, in their book “Identidad y Cambio” (Identity and Change), studied the history and evolution of the terms involved in Erikson´s concept of identity, ego and self, in pursuit of conceptualizing ‘non-ego’, ‘non-self’, and various permutations of the unconscious fantasy of self in the ego, in an intent to systematize their coherent relationship. The Grinbergs point out that, in the present time, Erikson´s concept of identity is as strategic as the study of sexuality in Freud´s time. What constitutes the primary identity attachments leads to differentiation between the ego and the self. The concepts of ego and self are clearly different and need to be understood as separate concepts. According to Grinbergs, the investigations of the problems of the self starts precisely with Hartmann’s distinction between ego as a psychic system and the self as referring to oneself. Grinberg understands Hartmann´s concept of ego to be neither synonymous with that of personality, nor subject as opposed to object of the experience, it is more like the consciousness of the sense of oneself. For him, the ego is a substructure of the personality and is defined by its functions. These functions refer to Freud´s first ego, the body ego, meaning the influence that the body image has on the differentiation of self from the world of objects, but also, how the functions of the organs of the body establish contact with the external world and fall gradually under the ego´s control. This postulate helps Hartmann in avoiding the confusion that exists between self as an object as oppose to the ego as organization. The word ego is used to include psychological processes/functions such as thinking, perception, remembering, feeling and has an organizational and self-regulating function in relation to the self. The ego functions are responsible for the development and execution of the satisfaction of the internal drives on one hand, and the demands of the external world on the other. The self is an intermediate concept between the intrapsychic phenomena and that which concerns the interpersonal experience. Grinberg views Hartmann´s ideas as giving Edith Jacobson the impetus for elaborating further the concept of self that encompasses the whole person including the body and its parts called the primary psycho-physiological self, with equal libidinal and aggressive drives that give birth to primary narcissism and masochism. As the ego evolves, it incorporates its mnemic representation of objects, and as the individual grows, he/she will be able to differentiate the internal from the external, the ego from the self and from objects, as well as differentiating the ego representations from the self-representations. Thus, the secondary narcissism and masochism respond to aggressive and libidinal drives of these representations of self, contained in the ego, now differentiated. Identity has two aspects, one that refers to the self and the other to the ego linked to the synthetic function. In Grinberg’s view, according to Jacobson, the self has a temporal dimension that includes the changing phases of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. In the psychotic organization a false self develops, a self that protects the real self until a more facilitating milieu allows the emergence of the genuine self, recovered by the ego. According to Grinberg, this is how the concepts transit from Freud (the body ego) to Erik Erikson (the constitution of identity), to Jacobson (the temporality of the self in the ego formation), Otto Kernberg´s (clarification of the meaning of temperament, character and personality) and to Melanie Klein (self as introjection identification as a result of the ego introjection of the object and the projective identification as a result of the projection of the
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