Back to Table of Contents
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 of “as if” personality refers to patients whose internal reality is characterized by the absence of the Self, and it may be represented by an empty envelope, whose external boundaries are invested to keep out objects, representations and affects. Edith Jacobson describes the personality of the psychotic who, on the contrary, suffers a fragmentation of his own Self, within a “too full” interior psychic reality whose boundaries are constantly threatened by the irruption of external reality. Additionally, while disagreeing with Hartmann’s distinction between Ego and Self, which would challenge the intrinsic contradiction of the Freudian ‘Ich’, Pontalis recognizes the merit of Hartmann and also of Kohut for having extended the field of psychoanalytic research to the disorders of the narcissistic spectrum through the development of their respective Self theories. From this apparent contradiction between theoretical framework and experiences that emerges in the depth of clinical work, Pontalis suggests that
781
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online