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Levenson deems self and other as essentially inextricable. For him, ‘self’ is a process of the ongoing unfolding of a person’s adaptations to the challenges that the interpersonal world presents, and psychopathology is seen in the failures to confront such challenges. In clinical practice, any narrative about the self or the other is likely to be a somewhat defensively organized construction designed to exclude other more disturbing perspectives. In Europe , the psychoanalytic exploration of concept of Self originates mainly in post- Freudian psychoanalysis, in particular in the conceptualization of object relations, with developments related also to the psychoanalysis of children and adolescence. Some precursors of this concept may be identified both in Freud and in Melanie Klein, although not through the formulation of an explicit theory. Winnicott is the first author who has developed a complete and constantly updated theory of the Self, importantly including his conceptualizations of true self and false self. The traces of his thought have influenced the expansion of Self theories in different currents of European psychoanalysis: The English authors have favored the exploration of the Self within the object relations theories. Bollas developed in his own way Winnicott’s ideas of the true self. He gradually preferred the term “idiom”, describing idiom not as a latent content of meaning but an aesthetic in personality. For Fairbairn the Self exists from the beginning and is the result of experience. It is a living growing center that he viewed as the point of origin of human psychic process. In Italian psychoanalysis, the concept of Self was developed by authors, who have theorized its genesis from the primitive mind in the relationship with the mother (Eugenio Gaddini), or from the “group matrix” (Giovanni Hautmann), or from the trans-generational dimension (Diego Napolitani), or as a device to analyze the dynamics in the analyst-patient relationship (Stefano Bolognini). In the French tradition Pontalis has explored the limits of the concept of the Self, recognizing its usefulness in understanding more deeply its relationships with the agencies of Ego, Id and Super-Ego. A further contribution to the elaboration of the theories on the Self comes both from the psychoanalysis of children through some aspects of the thoughts of Frances Tustin, Renata Gaddini, Margaret Mahler and Daniel Stern, and from the psychoanalysis of adolescents through the influence of Peter Blos’s theory on the thinking of such authors as Novelletto, Senise and others. In Latin America , either to get out from a conceptual quagmire (Freud, Hartmann), or to describe a theoretical or clinical entity, previously under-theorized and unrecognized, the concept of Self has most often been associated with a possible alternative to a dogmatic technique, allowing current pathologies to be addressed in the clinical practice. Echoing Nemirovsky’s emphasis on the importance of developing adequate theoretical instruments to approach the clinical problems of the current psychoanalytic practice, the concept of Self allows psychoanalysts to move forward in the direction of a better assistance to the contemporary patient population suffering from serious personality disturbances. Overall, the study and application of the Self concept in Latin America took place in three stages. In the first stage, which includes the decades of the 60s ‘and 70s’, the efforts were exerted to define the Self and differentiate it from the Ego. In the second stage, the greater dissemination of the ideas of Winnicott and Kohut, and their consequent clinical application in
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