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psychoanalytic work involving de-identification will inevitably be inappropriate and destructive. This nuclear self relates to a deep identity (the equivalent of Winnicott’s ‘true self’). The overall picture formed by the internal objects, the nuclear self and their relations can transmit a basic emotional atmosphere of the self, whose occasional fluctuations can be perceived in the patient’s state of mind, in the contents of his dreams and the atmosphere of the session. The analyst can choose to observe this dream theatre or take an active part in it. In the first case he works mainly by the ego; in the second case he brings his own self into play too. Various combinations and permutations of analytic work, encompassing contacts between analyst’s and patient’s ego s and selves, lead to processes involving ego’s growth and emancipations (from id and superego) on one hand, and expansion and enrichment of self on the other hand go hand in hand: “Experience teaches us that in a good analysis these two processes of development are destined to meet and combine harmoniously, in spite of whatever the various prominent theorists of technique might say: the result is a person with a valid ego and a rich self …” (Bolognini 1991, pp. 348-349).
VI. C. Self in French and French-Related Tradition Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
Pontalis (1977/1983) described intermediary areas between the dream and psychic pain, where, in his view, the birth and recognition of the self occurs. According to this view, it is not so much the pleasure, but the suffering, an intensely subjective aspect of pain, which contributes to psychic structuring and ‘subjectivization’, as it reveals and influences the condition of the subject/self. Pontalis’ seminal paper “Naissance et reconnaissance du soi” [Birth and recognition of the self’ in English transl.] presents a fundamental chapter in his book “ Entre le rêve et la douleur” [In between dreams and pain] (Pontalis 1977/1983), where such notions are introduced, is considered also one of the first French texts on the ‘as if personalities’ of Helene Deutsch (1942) and ‘true’ and ‘false Self’ of Winnicott, putting in perspective the Psychology of the Ego and that of the Self. Pontalis (1977/1983) thoroughly examines the genesis of the concept of the Self and its implications with respect to the Freudian theory. He criticizes the illusory unity of the concept of Self, in which he sees the risk of escaping the irreducibility of conflict, the alterity of the unconscious, the irreconcilability of representations, the multiple transformations of drives, and the multiplicity of identifications. Accordingly, he stresses that the unity of the Self could contradict the complex articulation of psychic reality, on the basis of the Freud’s Structural Theory/Second Topography, the formation and differentiation of the various psychic agencies and their irreducible conflict, for the benefit of a model of unitary growth, very close to the organic model. Despite this, Pontalis brings some examples related to clinical investigation that make the introduction of the concept of Self useful. The first one concerns a comparison between two types of patients introduced by Helene Deutsch and Edith Jacobson, for whose description both authors have used the notion of the Self. Helene Deutsch’s (1942) description
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