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elaborates his image of idiom as an “intelligence of form” and his ideas of idiomatic object- usage, which he began in ”Forces of Destiny”. “The idiom,” he writes, “that gives form to any human character is not a latent content of meaning but an aesthetic in personality” (pp. 64-65). Our idiom is “our mystery” (1992, p 51). It cannot be known or reached through introspection. We will never encounter the true self as such, we will never know what it is, neither our own or the other’s, but we can sense its derivatives intuitively, in a similar way that we can only sense the Unconscious through it derivatives. Bollas views one’s idiom as being articulated through one’s choice and use of objects, both in the transitional sense (where inner and outer reality meet and where the question of what comes from inside and from outside is kept suspended) and in the “objective” sense, where one encounters the object’s quality of being fundamentally itself, outside the sphere of projective mechanisms, what Bollas calls the integrity of the object. Bollas writes: “If idiom is, then, the it with which we are born, and if its pleasure is to elaborate itself through the choice of objects, one that is an intelligence of form rather than an expression of inner content, its work collides with the structure of the objects that transform it, through which it gains its precise inner contents. This collisional dialectic between the human’s form and the object’s structure is, in the best of times, a joy of living, as one is nourished by the encounter” (Bollas 1992, pp. 59-60). In several instances Bollas discusses the deep “sense of self”. In the chapter “What is this thing called self?” in “Cracking up – the Work of Unconscious Experience” (Bollas 1995) he calls it “a separate sense. A sense that is only a potential in each person, who is born with this sense capacity, and who will, to a greater or lesser extent, develop it.” (ibid, p 154). This sense of self can be blocked and thwarted when, in the individual’s life, there has been too little of sensitive responses to his idiomatic expressions, leaving him with a feeling of emptiness and lack of contact inwards. In the sense of self, Bollas writes, “There is a feeling there of one’s being, of something there, but not a something we can either touch or know; only sense, and it is the most important sensed phenomenon in our life.” (ibid, p 172). VI. B. Italian Contributors Where in British psychoanalysis, theories of the Self have been developed within the object relations tradition, in Italian psychoanalysis the concept of Self was developed by authors who have theorized its genesis from the primitive mind in the relationship with the mother (Eugenio Gaddini); from the “group matrix” (Giovanni Hautmann); from the trans- generational dimension (Diego Napolitani); or as a device to analyze the dynamics in the analyst-patient relationship (Stefano Bolognini) . Eugenio Gaddini (in: Mascadini, Gaddini, De Benedetti, 1989), through his deep knowledge and collaboration with Winnicott was one of the psychoanalysts who imported and developed theories of the Self in Italian psychoanalysis. In referring to the Self, he uses the term “organizer”, with respect to the term “structure”, to indicate its catalytic function in the
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