My Self, My Many Selves

Joseph Redfearn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429916441
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

'The concept of the "self" has remained puzzling and controversial. Indeed, far from gaining clarity, it seems to become ever more complex; for many different people, starting from different premises and having different goals have come to "appropriate" this term. The author has made what seems to me to be a most valuable contribution by sticking firmly to an experiential approach. The author has thought hard and deeply about the different ways in which we experience the "I" and drawn on his own "I" experience as well as on those of his patients and Jung himself. 'The author tells us in his introduction that the main aim of his book is to illustrate the migratory nature of the feeling of "I" and that the goal of analysis is to "facilitate and open up interaction and intercommunication between our various selves".

Chapter One

Ego and self: terminology

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Introduction

A psychological schema of the structure of the mind is like a map. It should not be confused with the real thing. A map is used for a purpose. A geological map would be useless to a motorist. A sociologist’s map would be different from a psychotherapist’s. Freudian, Jungian and behavioural psychotherapists need different maps because of their differing goals and methods of arriving at them.

I said that the map should not be confused with the real thing. What is the “real thing” in the case of the mind? A series of maps or representations? If so, what is the nature of the “I” to whom they are presented? A further series of representations? Is the “I” based on energy/matter, or is energy/matter merely a split-off, ephemeral and alienated aspect of a universal “I” or psyche? Or can we arrive at our personal resolution of these apparently polarized views of the nature of the psyche and of matter?

How far does introspection lead us in our experience of ourself? Our experience of ourselves is necessarily a matter for introspection, if not for introspection alone. Writing in 1910, Williams James distinguished between “I”, the self as knower and doer, and “me”, or myself as known or experienced. He saw no value in studying the “I” as a knower and felt it should be banished to the realms of philosophy. Concerning the “myself” as known, James included a material self which contained one’s body, one’s family and one’s possessions; then a social self which was a reflection of the way other people see the individual; and finally a spiritual self which included emotions and desires.

All these aspects of the self have stood the test of time and have been studied in detail. Furthermore, James recognized that all these aspects of self were capable of evoking feelings of heightened or lowered self-esteem. And finally, James described the self as carrying a feeling of basic unity and continuity, even while being highly differentiated.

Cooley (1912) defined “self” as that which is designated in common speech by the pronouns of the first person singular – I, me, mine, myself. The self is characterized by stronger emotions than is the non-self. Cooley introduced the concept of the “looking-glass self” – the individual perceiving himself in the way others see him. Taking this idea further, George Mead (1934) argued that the self-concept in fact arises out of the individual’s concern about how others react to him. Mead hypothesized a “generalized other” to account for generalized feelings about oneself. He averred that there are as many selves as there are social roles played by an individual. H. S. Sullivan (1953) agreed but stressed the importance of the mother as the most significant other person in determining the self-concept.

Allport (1955) used the word “proprium” to include the following attributes:

(1) Awareness of a bodily self.

(2) Sense of a continuity over time.

(3) A need for self-esteem.

(4) An extension of the “I” or ego beyond the borders of the body.

(5) An ability to synthesize inner needs and outer reality.

(6) A self-image, a perception and evaluation of the self as an object of knowledge.

(7) There is the self as knower and doer.

(8) There is on occasions a need to increase tensions, expand awareness, seek and meet challenges etc.

I mention these authors in the general psychological literature because their contributions seem to me basically sound and fundamental ones.

Ego and Self in Psychoanalysis

In attempting to sketch developments in psychoanalytic terminology, I shall need to shorten and over-simplify to such a degree as perhaps to cause pain to each reader. I shall need much generosity from all, as each would summarize important changes in his own way. But I am not writing about the authors’ actual views. I am using selected quotations and summaries in order to discuss terminology, typical possible terminologies. I might have invented the quotations myself without affecting the validity of this chapter, which is written to alert the reader to terminological confusions. The scope for confusion is not limited to terminology, and some readers will be offended by the simplistic clarity of my presentation, which in a sense ignores the real, non-terminological confusions and paradoxes in the actual phenomenology of the experiences described below.

Freud

In abandoning hypnosis in the therapy of neurosis, Freud discovered resistance and laid the foundation of psychoanalysis. At first his “ego” was roughly equivalent to the conscious and preconscious parts of the mind. The unconscious, on the other hand, contained repressed contents. Libido was the expression of the sexual instinct, with the ego in conflict, responsible for repression and reality-testing. In his early papers, Freud regarded the ego as the organ of defence, but even in 1896 he knew that some defences are unconscious. The term “das Ich” was also used sometimes to distinguish oneself as a whole from other people. Strachey says that when he meets this use, he usually translates it as “the self” (Freud, 1923 Std Edn, 19, 7).

By 1914–15 Freud was distinguishing between ego instincts and object instincts. In this context ego means oneself. Megalomania was explained in terms of these ego instincts, as were self-regard and self-esteem.

In his essay “On narcissism”, written about that time, Freud (1914) described the antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. He used the simile of an amoeba throwing out pseudopods, suggesting a basic unity of libido but flowing in opposite directions.

By this time Freud is beginning to develop the idea of a super-ego comparing the behaviour of the individual with that of his ego-ideal. He used the notion to explain the paraphrenic’s delusions of being watched. He saw the primary state of the infant as that of boundaryless self-love which he called primary narcissism, but self and not-self were as yet undifferentiated. He saw the ego developing out of this state by displacement of libido on to the mother and later on to an ideal. Satisfaction is brought about by fulfilling the mother’s (later the ideal’s) requirements.

Later, Freud used this interplay between object libido and narcissism to account for the building-up of complex functions, such as sublimation and the fusion or neutralization of instincts.

In his important paper “The ego and the id” Freud (1923) made his last theoretic reformulation of the structure of the mind. He distinguished carefully between ego and the quality of consciousness, and he elaborated the watching faculty of the super-ego, taken to pathological extremes in obsessional neurosis and pathological mourning. The super-ego is held to arise out of the transformation of oedipal object cathexis into identifications, and takes the place of the Oedipus complex. Freud restricted the term “unconscious” to that which has been repressed. He now defined the ego as a coherent organization of mental processes. It is to this ego that consciousness is attached. It controls the approaches to motility and goes to sleep at night. Even then it censors the dreams. It is responsible for repressions and resistances. But resistances, although emanating from the ego, are unconscious. So part of the ego is unconscious, and “behaves exactly like the repressed” in producing powerful effects. Now he derives neuroses not from a conflict between conscious and unconscious, but between the coherent ego and the repressed which is split off from it.

An unconscious thought becomes conscious, via the preconscious, by becoming connected with word-presentations, which are residues of memories. Consciousness is primarily to do with this system of word-presentation. Internal perceptions (from internal sensory apparatus) become conscious directly, bypassing the preconscious, when they become conscious at all.

The other part of the mind, into which the ego extends, was now called the “id”, following Groddeck, who regarded the ego as a surface phenomenon merely being lived out by the unconscious forces of the id. Part of the lower ego is discontinuous with the id owing to repression. Thus the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world through the medium of perceptions; it is in a sense an extension of the surface-differentiation. The ego mediates between the instincts and the external world through the reality principle and not through self-regard. Freud described the ego in its relations to the id as like a man on horseback. Often, he says, the man has to guide the horse where it wants to go. The ego is first and foremost a body ego, ultimately derived from bodily sensations, and itself the projection of the bodily surface. The reservoir of libido is now clearly the id. In later writings Freud used the concept of an undifferentiated ego–id forming a great reservoir of libido.

A large body of psychoanalytic literature has arisen surrounding “ego-defences” and “ego-boundaries”. In her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, Anna Freud (1946) elaborates on the defences used by the ego to defend the ego. Here she is often referring to the feeling of “I” or “myself” and not merely to the system “ego” as defined above by Freud. The notion of ego-boundaries and their preservation also refers to the self as distinct from others and not to Freud’s system ego.

Klein, Winnicott and Erikson

The psychoanalysis of children and of psychotic patients has enriched our knowledge of early and archaic levels of the development of personal identity. One thinks of such analysts as Melanie Klein, Erikson and Winnicott as making fundamental contributions to terminology.

Melanie Klein uses the term “ego” to mean both the subjective “I” or “myself” on the one hand, and the “system ego” on the other, with its various stage-appropriate ways of enhancing, depending and strengthening itself. Just as the baby sucks, takes in, shrinks from, spits out and eliminates various objects in his struggle to survive, so the infant ego is seen taking in, avoiding spitting out and eliminating good and bad “objects” or parts of “objects” (mental representations of bits of his environment). Thus the ego arises out of some sort of mental representation (“brain map”) of the baby himself. This is not nonsense, as would first appear, because the baby himself, his insides, his outside and the world of vision and hearing give rise to nervous impulses which are topographically distributed throughout the nervous system. Thus the body-image as sensed and perceived is an accurate map, in his brain, of the baby himself. The Kleinian views the ego and the psyche as a body-ego and a psyche-ego. The Kleinian “mechanisms” are all derived from as well as representations of bodily processes, sensations and reactions.

In his classic work Childhood and Society and his other writings, Erikson (1950), while adhering in his definition of ego to Freud’s definition, writes of ego identity and of the growth of a personal sense of identity. He writes of the ego as if it were a kind of person dwelling between the extremes of the “bestial” impersonal id and the conscience which is often harsh and restrictive. The ego keeps tuned to reality and integrates the individual’s planning and orientation. Admittedly it uses “defence mechanisms”, but “we wish to extend our reach beyond the mere defensive aspects”. The ego is an “inner institution”, evolved to safeguard order within the individual. In the case of a schizophrenic girl, “we see a very young ego struggle for coherence, and fail”. Play situations “indicate the narrow area within which our ego can feel superior to the confinement of space and time and to the definitiveness of social reality – free from the compulsions of conscience and from impulsions of irrationality.” Here the ego is clearly a self with human feelings, closely related to well-being and good self-esteem. In this book, Erikson describes the child’s acquisition of a sound sense of personal identity based on the body image, and goes on to trace this development in the adult. He thus extends the concept of the “I” to that of a personal identity and gives descriptions of clinical aspects of “ego-growth” and of failures in this area. For Erikson this personal identity has primarily a mediating function between inner and outer needs, between instincts and standards, etc.

Winnicott (1965), on the other hand, uses the term “ego” to mean an integrating function of the brain present from the beginning. Thus an anencephalic infant would have an id but no ego, whereas an infant with a normal brain would already have an ego as well as an id. The ego is there from the start. In fact “the start is when the ego starts”. “It will be seen”, says Winnicott (1965), “that the ego offers itself for study long before the word self has relevance.” “The word self arrives after the child has begun to use the intellect to look at what others see or feel or hear and what they conceive of when they meet this infant body.” “The strength of the ego depends on the actual mother’s ability to meet the absolute dependence of the actual infant at the beginning, at the stage before the infant has separated out the mother from the self.” It is possible “to violate the infant’s ego-function, or that which later on will be jealously guarded as the self, the core of the personality” if the mother lacks the capacity to protect the infant from unthinkable anxiety by being able to put herself in the baby’s place and know what the baby needs in the general management of the body and therefore of the person.

A baby is a person who is on the brink of unthinkable anxiety which has the following varieties:

(1) Going to pieces.

(2) Falling for ever.

(3) Having no relationship to the body.

(4) Having no orientation.

These anxieties are the stuff of psychotic anxieties. What is threatened is what Winnicott terms ego-functioning or, subjectively, what will only later become the self in his terminology. Maternal failure at this stage can lead to schizoid disorder and to the formation of a false self which is an attempt at self-holding.

For Winnicott, ego development depends on the ego-supportive mother and is characterized by the following trends:

(1) integration in time and space, depending on the mother’s holding.

(2) Personalization – the development of the body ego and of a firm union of ego and body, depending on the mother’s handling.

(3) Object-relating, both to things and persons, depending on the mother’s way and timing of object-presentation.

Differentiation into “I” and “you”, into “I” and “non-I”, the development of subjective objects and of objectively experienced objects, and of his capacity for realism proceeds gradually so long as the mother understands the child’s reality limitations. For a long time the child retains areas of subjective objects as well as areas of objectively perceived objects (“not-me” objects).

Thus in Winnicott’s rather comprehensive terminology, the ego is the original integrating function; schizoid mechanisms arise out of threats to the pre-self (or what will later become the self) and the self is oneself as distinct from other people, and is importantly dependent on how others experience the individual. In other words, it is a function of reflection from others. Thus the self for Winnicott is what arises out of the differentiation of an original integrate.

Jacobson, Hartmann, Fordham and Kohut

For Edith Jacobson (1964), in her book The Self and the Object World, and for Michael Fordham (1976) in his book The Self and Autism the original integrate is called “the primal self”. For Jacobson (1964, p. 19) “the establishment of the system ego sets in with the discovery of the object world and the growing distinction between it and one’s own physical and mental self”. Jacobson’s terminology is thus more or less the opposite of Winnicott’s as far as ego and self are concerned. For Fordham also the ego is related to the experience of “I” and is differentiated out of the primal self; it is only a part of the whole self. However, neither Jacobson nor Fordham are consistent in their use of the word “self”. For example, Jacobson’s use of the word self in the sentence just quoted (“one’s own physical and mental self” as distinct from the “not-me”) does not conform with her own definition of her use of the word “self”, and coincides with Winnicott’s self. And Fordham (1974) describes some schizoid defences as defences of the self when he is not speaking of the primary integrate or total personality but of a pre-“myself”, or pre-ego in Jungian terminology.

Jacobson states that her definition of “self” is based on Hartmann’s (1950) definition as the whole individual, including mind and body. Jacobson (1964, p. 6) says that the term self was introduced by Hartmann, and thus she ignores the voluminous writings on the subject by C. G. Jung, on whose work Fordham’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Ego and self: terminology
• 2. The Jungian Self
• 3. God and myself, God as myself
• 4. The omnipotent “I” and the realistic “I”
• 5. The body, the body-image and the self
• 6. Are our “minds” in our heads? The location of the feeling of “I”
• 7. The sub-personalities: archetypes and complexes
• 8. The winning of conscious choice: the emergence of symbolic activity
• 9. Boundaries and mandalas
• 10. Conclusion
• References
• Index