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a self rests on an illusory unification applied to inner experience. Coming from different perspectives, Rationalist Descartes and Empirist Hume, as later Heinz Hartmann can appear mechanistic, and do not escape the homuncular self problem. While some heralded Freud’s formulation of the unconscious (Freud 1915) with intricate divisions of the subject in topographical and structural models as resolving the philosophers’ dispute about the identity of the self, others (Winicott, Sartre, Lacan) looked for further solutions. Hegel’s “experience of having a self requires an engagement with another subject” (Kirshner 1991, p. 168) and his depiction of alienation of the subject in such an encounter has direct descendants in existentialism of Sartre and Heidegger, Lacan, and in a different way in Winnicott. 20 th century French philosophy, in search of the contemporary human subject, in particular, has been engaged in a direct long-running conversation with psychoanalysis. Michel Foucault’s writings on the ‘care of the self’, on ‘hermeneutics of the subject’ and on the ‘government of the self and others’ introduce a conception of ethics as a relation of self to itself in terms of its moral agency, which in itself is a product of self-forming activity called ‘subjectivation’, a term later picked up by French psychoanalysts. In this context, care of the self is understood as transformation of the self into a fruitful existence. Gaston Bachelard’s (1938/64) “Psychoanalysis of Fire” presents a poetic exploration of various primary complexes revolving around fire mythology based on dream, reverie, daydream and poetic imagery, where the ‘non-I’ of the dreamer is in a playful reverie-like internal dialogue with the dreamer’s ‘I’. Here, reverie replaces inhibition and censorship. Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1943/1992)’s “Being and Nothingness” proposes that what defines the subject is not a structure, but a fundamental project of existence: the project replaces the complex. French philosophers in particular saw Freud’s psychoanalytic formulation of the metapsychology of the unconscious as a new radical proposition about the subject: With the idea of the dynamic unconscious comes the notion of the human subject that is far greater than consciousness (it contains consciousness, but is not restricted by it), which concentrates de-centered creative forces within it. Yet, the common aims are pursued by different means: the intense dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis is marked not only by complicity and admiration but also by rivalry and competition. Such multi-faceted and multi-layered dialogue proliferates into many psychoanalytic orientations across all continents and psychoanalytic cultures. The shape it takes, is often shaped by the issues surrounding translatability of the term and meaning. II. B. Original Freud Terminology and Translatability of ‘Self’: View From North America and Europe It has been observed from variety of perspectives (Gammelgaard, 2003; Kelen, 1990; Kernberg, 1982; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973; Kohut, 1971; Winnicott, 1960; Grinberg 1966) that the introduction and further development of the concept of self in psychoanalysis can be
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