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In North America , where object relations consideration has always been part of all post Freudian psychoanalytic theories, the Ego Psychologists Edith Jacobson and Margaret Mahler, following Hartmann’s reformulation of narcissism as libidinal investment of the self rather than of ego, constructed a view of self-development that could account for the formation of a complex set of self and object representations while retaining a view of the sexual and aggressive drives as the underpinnings of human experience. In a contemporary Freudian frame of reference, accordingly, Rangell reformulated Hartmann’s prior reformulation of narcissism as an investment of the self-representations rather than of the self. Blum has further integrated Mahler’s Separation-Individuation theory with contemporary developmental research, highlighting the self-object differentiation as the crucial prerequisite for the formation of the self. Along these lines, Otto Kernberg has developed a comprehensive American model of Object Relations that integrates Freudian structural theory, object relations and neuroscience, describing “self-object-affect units” as the building blocks of a superordinate self, as the sum total of self representations. Another approach to the development of the self follows the work of Winnicott in Arnold Modell’s synthesis of Freudian drive theory, Winnicott, intersubjectivity and neuroscience. In this context, self is both an evolving contingent product and an enduring core, a process and a re-contextualized re-transcription of an experience. A major landmark in the theory of narcissism and the concept of ‘self’, Kohut’s school of Self Psychology places the development of the self and self-esteem at the center of psychoanalytic inquiry, articulating how the self forms through the internalization of experiences with caregivers. Kohut described how early empathic experiences give rise to internal ‘self-objects’ which help maintain a stable, robust sense of self that can tolerate life’s disappointments, and how a caregiver’s empathic failures and could give rise to narcissistic psychopathology. In his radical revision of psychoanalytic clinical practice, he suggested that the analyst needed to provide the self-object experiences the patient had not received in childhood. According to Harry Stack Sullivan, the author of the Interpersonal theory in psychiatry and the founder of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, the ‘self’ is a collection of various reflected appraisals of others. His concept of self is essentially multiple as there is a somewhat different self for each distinct relationship. For Sullivan, shame, not guilt, is at the center of the human experience, as danger comes from an encounter with the other. Following Sullivan, contemporary interpersonalists and relational theorists like Bromberg, Stern, Mitchell and Levenson view the self as emerging in the interpersonal field. As the self is responding to the ever-shifting set of relational experiences, it is necessarily multiple. Bromberg views the mind as a collection of ‘self-states’ and the ‘unitary self’ as a necessary illusion. In his view, the particularly threatening self-states are deemed ‘not me’ experiences, which are subjected to dissociation. Psychopathology is determined by the degree of dissociation with the more extreme examples constituting psychotic experiences. Mitchell describes multiple self-states as akin to internalized self-object relationships. However, Mitchell postulates a distinct and valid sense of a ‘private self’ that serves to constitute a boundary between oneself and others.
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