Back to Table of Contents
intercepted in the analytic session, contained and understood by the analyst’s reverie and re- signified through his interpretative activity. Diego Napolitani (1987, 1991, 2005) proposes a model of formation of the individual Self, understood as a strong identity nucleus/central core, starting from the matrice gruppale (group/collective matrix), stratified in its cultural, social and family dimensions. Napolitani modeled his Self construct with the help of a graphic representation that he defined as the “map of the bipolar mind”, in which he indicates the “masculine” and the “feminine” components as two different ways of approaching knowledge and vision of the world. In the map of the ‘Bipolar Mind’ the author identifies three dimensions: 1. The IDEM (Latin for ‘sameness and identity’) is closely related to the original environment (individual’s past, from the most distant origins to the most recent relational experiences), the core of the roots of the identity; it is the complex of experiences in the history of each human being, from birth to the present moment , the world of traditions, the set of relational, affective, intellectual accumulated experiences in the history of each individual. The Idem is “my tradition and my culture”, and as such also “a prejudicial way of knowledge”. The formation of the Self coincides in the bipolar map with the IPSE (Latin for himself/herself, in person) and indicates the reflective dimension, the self- awareness through the emergence from the Idem. The Ipse coincides with the conscious Self, and it develops from linguistic, gestural, ethical codes, internalized as identification from the original environment. Finally, the author identifies a third place of the bipolar map that is AUTOS (Greek for He), the self-reorganizing device that reveals itself in the production of symbols, the symbol-poetic ability which represents the source of all these complex proceedings that connect the individual with his own original matrices on one side and his own becoming on the other; Autos maintains the Self in a condition of a permanently unstable equilibrium between the conservative dimension and the transformative dimension, thus passing from heteronomy (obedience to the law of the other) to autonomy (the construction of the symbol around which to articulate its own law). Stefano Bolognini (1991) has developed a theory of the Self focusing on the dyad patient-analyst at work. Bolognini underlines the differences between the terms “Ego and Self”. The Ego is defined according to Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) as: (1) nucleus of consciousness and bundle of active mental functions; (2) organizer of the defenses; (3) agency, mediating between external reality, id and super-ego. The “Self” is the set of representations concerning the person himself when he is an object (potential or actual) of his own subjective experience. Unlike ego, id and superego, which are dynamic components of the psychic apparatus, self is a content of the apparatus, in the same way as the representations of objects. Being a unit with continuity over time, self is configured as one internal structure of the psyche, in which, however, it has a complex location: various and often conflicting representations of the self are distributed in the ego, in the id and in the super-ego (Kohut 1971). Accordingly, the self appears to be partly conscious, partly unconscious. Bolognini proposes a model of interplay of Ego and Self in the dyad patient/analyst, where 4 combinations are explored: 1. The contact between the Ego of the Analyst/the Ego of the Patient, whereby portions of the patient’s psychic life are communicated at a conscious
779
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online