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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 the clinical practice, is accompanied by theoretical elaboration, tending to discern the novelty of these conceptualizations with respect to the classic Freudian and Kleinian referential frames. In this stage, through André Green’s reinterpretation of the ideas of Winnicott, the study of the Self receives a new stimulus. In the 21 st century, renewed criticisms related to dogmatism in technique, and the need to tackle disorders in which isolation and apathy predominate, lead to an emphasis on relational aspects, which, in turn, accompanies the interest and development of interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis in the region. This provides yet a new stimulus for the further theoretical developments that prominently include the concept of Self. Strongly resonating with Latin American cultural identity, but applicable worldwide, Pichon Rivière’s psychoanalytic conceptualization of links and bridges between the internal and external worlds, in addition to his ‘ dialectic spiral’ linking contradictory movements of regression and progression, extended onto contradictory movements of any kind, is envisioned as also applicable to the wide context of the elaborations of the self-concepts in the different regions and among the diverse psychoanalytical schools.
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