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III. EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT
III. A. Pre-analytic Roots: William James In his “Principles of Psychology”, William James (1890/92) undertook a thorough study of self within the young discipline of academic-experimental-phenomenological psychology. He postulates the existence of three ‘Empirical Selves’ (The material/body Self; The social Self; The spiritual Self) and the theoretical construct of ‘The Pure Ego’. Each of the empirical selves is capable of arousing feelings and emotions, which he calls ‘Self-feelings’; and each of them is capable of prompting an action of ‘Self-seeking’ and ‘Self-preservation’. James also acknowledges conflict between different Experiential Selves, reflecting conflicting needs. The Pure Ego is a theoretical construct, consisting of personal Identity and of Pure Self of personal unity. III. B. Early Psychoanalytic Roots Various precursors of the concept of Self are variably present already in Freud, Ferenczi and Klein. III. Ba. Roots in Sigmund Freud For Freud, “das Ich” (translated by Strachey as “the ego” rather than “the I”) refers to both a mental agency as well as a subjective experience. While in German original this dual aspect of ‘Ich’ seems to indicate an important ‘Ich’ characteristic, Strachey’s English translation and terminological shift from ‘I’ to ‘the ego’ prompted the need to distinguish more clearly the propensities of the ego as a mental structure and psychic agency from the phenomenological experiential self (see above). Throughout his opus, Freud maintained this duality of ‘Ich’, sometimes equating the self with the Ich, other times with the whole person, still other times with an aspect of Ich. In a derivative form, the self (Selbst) first appears in Freud’s early theory, which sets up the anti-thesis between the self-preservative and sexual instincts: “… unterscheiden wir auch in der Psychoanalyse die Selbsterhaltungs- oder Ich-Triebe von den Sexualtrieben …” , in English: “… in psycho-analysis too we make a distinction between the self-preservative or ego-instincts on the one hand and the sexual instincts on the other” (Freud, 1917a. p. 4; Freud 1917b, p.137). While Freud emphasized a mind (originally ‘Seele’/’soul’/psyche) that is divided and to a great extent influenced by unconscious drives, the view of a self as distinct from the ego was not his objective. One way that Freud strove to address what psychoanalysts today might regard as self-experience was through his theory of narcissism. In his paper “On Narcissism” (1914), Freud used this concept to explain phenomena such as omnipotence, grandiosity, idealization and narcissistic object choice. While Freud viewed object love as a developmental
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