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of “as if” personality refers to patients whose internal reality is characterized by the absence of the Self, and it may be represented by an empty envelope, whose external boundaries are invested to keep out objects, representations and affects. Edith Jacobson describes the personality of the psychotic who, on the contrary, suffers a fragmentation of his own Self, within a “too full” interior psychic reality whose boundaries are constantly threatened by the irruption of external reality. Additionally, while disagreeing with Hartmann’s distinction between Ego and Self, which would challenge the intrinsic contradiction of the Freudian ‘Ich’, Pontalis recognizes the merit of Hartmann and also of Kohut for having extended the field of psychoanalytic research to the disorders of the narcissistic spectrum through the development of their respective Self theories. From this apparent contradiction between theoretical framework and experiences that emerges in the depth of clinical work, Pontalis suggests that notion of Self can help to highlight the subjective component of the patient and analyst in the analytic work. Finally, Pontalis proposes a careful re-examination of some central points of Winnicott’s ideas (transitional space, the creation of the transitional object, the distinction between true and false self), from which he takes inspiration to propose his own conceptualization of Self: “For a conscience and an experience of self to be possible, there is the need for an ego to be constituted, even if rudimentary it may be. The ego is the representative of the organism as a form, fragile in its vulnerability and reassuring in its fixity, like the image in the mirror: the ego is in an enclosed space and as embedded between the space of the id, always ready to invade it, and the outer space, always marked by the superego, which the ego must face: the Self is not the life impulse, but in the psychic space it is the representative of the living: the Self is in a space open, if I can say, to the two sides, to the environment that feeds it first and that in turn it creates”. (Pontalis, 1977/1980, p. 178). Taking up the idea of Winnicott that the Self is the custodian of the feeling of existing, Pontalis concludes: “Being someone who lives, it is a task already carried out, programmed for the animal organism, but always invented for man” (Pontalis 1977/1980, p. 178), highlighting the point of self-inventing property of Self. Judith Gammelgaard In her seminal paper on the subject “Ego, Self and Otherness” (Gammelgaard 2003), Gammelgaard synthesizes French philosophy of Ricouer (1992), with French psychoanalytic tradition of Laplanche (1992), Green (2000) and Piera Aulagnier (1975) together with Winnicott’s (1971) notion of the transitional space, to articulate in contemporary terms the Freudian contradictory and ambiguous conceptualization of de-centered ‘I’, including the ego, the self as well as the otherness. She situates the self in the intermediary area of experience, following Winnicott’s emphasis on the difference between relating to the object and using the object. Winnicott (1971) exemplifies that going from relating to the object to the use of the object implies that: (a) the subject phantasmatically destroys the object, and (b) the object
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