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contribution. In his “Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Modell 2003), the process of re- transcription is further elaborated by linking it with metaphoric creativity. In “The Sense of Agency and the Illusion of the Self” (Modell 2007), the self needs to be continually re- contextualized through emotional experience. In this paper, another example of inter-disciplinary thought, where he undertakes the phenomenon of phantom limb, he posits that the continuity of the self, a transitional creation “…may be an unconsciously generated illusion” (Modell 2007, p. 8), without which we cannot live (Kirshner 2010). Yet, true to his dialectical thought, in “The Unconscious as a Knowledge Processing Center” (Modell 2008), the self re-emerges as a process and dynamic re- transcription of experience, supplanting the illusion/fiction of a private continuous core self. Thomas Ogden Synthesizing Klein and Bion, and extending Bick, Meltzer and Tustin, Ogden (1989) recognizes a primitive, pre-symbolic, sensory dominated ‘autistic-contiguous’ mode, as decisive in generating rudimentary self-experiences in early development and autistic psychotic disturbances: “This mode is a primitive psychological organization operative from birth … It is sensory-dominated in which the most inchoate sense of self is built upon the rhythm of sensation, particularly at the skin surface … Sequences, symmetries, periodicity, skin- to-skin ‘molding’ are examples of contiguities that are the ingredients out of which the beginnings of rudimentary self experience arises …” (Ogden 1989, p. 30-31). Writing on reverie and metaphor, as essential ingredients of psychoanalytic work (Ogden 1997), he poses a duality within the self – ‘the self as an object’ and ‘the self as a subject’: “…what is occurring in the process of metaphor-making is the creation of the verbal symbols that give shape and emotional substance to the self as object (‘me’), thereby creating symbols that serve as mirrors in which the self as subject (‘I’) recognizes or creates itself.” (Ogden 1997, p. 729). Saturated with primary process mentation, Ogden’s duality of the self in reverie and metaphor reminds of previous James Grotstein’s contribution on multiple selves of the dreamer (Grotstein 1979).
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