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of the present times. He stresses the importance of psychoanalysts reinventing themselves at the present time, in a context, which may be ephemeral and difficult to encompass.
VIII. CONCLUSION
The tension, ambiguity and duality inherent in Freud’s ‘Ich’, which encompasses both the ‘ego’ as the mental structure and psychic agency, as well as the more personal experiential ‘self’, as the generator of subjective experience, has led to numerous psychoanalytic approaches to the age-old problem of what constitutes ‘the self’, in relation to ‘the ego’, in relation to the development of psychic structure, and in relation to the formulations of narcissism. Widening of scope of intense psychoanalytic interest in clinical conditions, which include serious nonorganic psychopathology of all age groups has brought the various developmental and clinical conceptualizations of the ‘self’ into prominence. While all contemporary psychoanalytic theories of early development and structure formation view the self as forming in relation to others, they also differ along numerous criteria, some of which are: relationship to drive theory in its various contemporary formulations; the relative centrality of the ‘other’; the weight given to real interaction versus unconscious fantasy/phantasy; whether the self is conceptualized as unitary or multiple or both, having predominantly structural or process characteristics; its relative permanence, continuity and/or fluidity and changeability. Often, divergences in conceptualizations of self reflect different frames of reference, different levels of discourse, and divergent translations between languages, stemming from different socio-cultural heritage. 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.
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