As a clinician over 5 decades, I offer my observations. Sociology offers that we exhibit a public and private personnas. And we look for congruence or congruence. I suggest a third sub-type of split object representation, cyber-self.

I see personality as the more consistent aspect over time how we think, feel and act.

For me personality is dynamically formed via many inputs from others. It reveals itself around age 5 when we are also internalizing gender role assignment. It begins to consolidate in our late teens. By around the 3rd decade it is relatively fixed.

We are also potently shaped by the processes of socialization and enculturation.

I attach a few articles in this regard. Great topic.

Rich

As a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, I have long read and employed the work of Donald Winnicott. We need to put Winnicott's work in historical perspective. He is part of those who adapted Freudian thought to working with children and hence brought an enhanced developmental aspect to Freud's legacy. Interestingly, this occurred in London where Freud had migrated in 1938 to avoid a sure death at the hands of the Nazis and where his daughter Anna continued his work adapted to children. Along with Anna Freud at the Tavistock Institute which became a centre for psychoanalytic theory, training and research, there was Melanie Klein with Winnicott forming what became known as the "middle group" between these two powerful female child analysts and their followers. (Full disclosure: I did part of my analytic training at the Tavistock and am more a follower of John Bowlby and his student RD Laing than any of the previous groups, although Bowlby was part of the middle group at the Tavi.)

The sociology of childhood and in general child or developmental studies were just beginning in psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis and so these early pioneers dominated thinking about children and development. Later, many other theories came along, often in reaction to and certainly independent of psychoanalytic thought.

That is how I situate the question posed here and the first two replies. We have long theorized that there is a public presentation of self and many of us believe that this is a social construction and not only a developmental one. As the first replies suggest, we all have a social presentation of self, first attempts, tentative definitions of who we are. This cannot be imagined only as an inward, interior process only and must take into account the social surround, starting with the family and attachment, which are in turn shaped by the community and all the other influences in the culture and the society. This includes John Bowlby's work in attachment theory which integrated the other pioneers brilliantly and surpasses them in both sophistication and relevance to working with children. Bowlby's work is also easier to operationalize and research, it must be said, although complexity and difficulty in research do not in principle disqualify the strength of developmental theories.

Does a false - let's call it a first, tentative self - disappear? It's a bit simplistic, but above all an illusion! Everything we adopt stays with us, knowingly or not, like a mother tongue, even when we appear to forget it from disuse. We may consciously disavow an earlier self, identification or belonging, but it has already formed who we are and is part of the scaffolding of whatever other choices, influences and factors come to bear to construct a new self. And it is a construction. There are some innate factors but to hammer on them as neuroscience wants to do is to evacuate human history, culture and society in a reductive and simplistic way.

Are all first attempts at a self false? No! A false self is a reaction or construction in light of limited and limiting circumstances that force an adaptation to the child's reality that distort what could be a more desirable, open, unencumbered way of presenting one's self to the world.

So any real answers to such questions must take into account all the new theories that have arisen since the interesting but limited work of Winnicott and the other pioneering child analysts. In passing, I have always been allergic to Kleinian ideas as she seemed to specialize in the worst aspects of humanity - splitting, projective identification, manic defenses - and many of her ideas were clearly stolen outright by Jacques Lacan without attribution. The followers of each group seem to unwittingly mimic the personalities of their followers so Kleinians are rather pessimisitc and sour people, Anna Freudians strike me as naive (she was totally uneducated except for her supposed training analysis with her father, absurd on the face of it and certainly unethical and bizarre even by the standards of the time), while Winnocottians seem to be like sensible Englishman who have a cheerful disposition and a pragmatic orientation to whatever reality is supposed to be. By the way, Winnicott is the most cited psychoanalytic theorist, surpassing even Freud himself today.

For any real knowledge of children and how to work with them to emerge, we must be aware but not married to these pioneers who led the way but we have to have the courage to move beyond them.

The self is too complex a notion to have any sure constructions either by the individual of her or his own self or by the field of the notion. Both behaviour therapy and family therapy, for example, have almost no notion of the self whatsoever and you may either feel they are greatly limited or liberated from the being tethered radically to the shores of the self, howsoever defined.

Regards,

Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD

Vincenzo Di Nicola, I fully agree that the notion of "The Self" is almost completely ignored by behavior/family therapists. Moreover this ignorance is the real reason why I asked my question.

Because if we suggest, just for a moment, that for a disordered patient we "know" her or his "true self", howsoever it defined, it would make much easier for us to propose the most effective treatment of this patient, wouldn't it?

So even if the attempts to define a simplest workable notion of the "true self" might seem naïve, should we completely reject these attempts? Or should we instead encourage further refinement of such notions by making them increasingly detailed and fitted to infinite complexity of human psyche?

Truly,

Kostia

I am not sure you follow my argument. Behaviour therapy and family therapy set aside the issue of the self in favour of other ways to conceive of therapy. From the behavioural or relational perspective, whether the self is true or false is beside the point - and by the way, I agree with these approaches. Behaviour therapy would analysis how behaviour is generated and maintained while family therapy addresses relationships and family interactions to create roles and functions in the family.

Even in psychoanalysis, the notion of a false self is at best a way to point to the sum of factors in which someone has developed a kind of mask that doesn't allow the expression of a genuine range of feelings and thoughts that render the individual more functional. It's an intriguing notion but it's not much better than a restatement of the problem. The success of psychoanalysis to bring about real change is rather slim. At best, people just become better at using the language of the analyst to describe their experiences. Genuine change is even more difficult to guide than it is to imagine and describe. That said, I am not very impressed with the alternatives either. As the English say about alcohol consumption, choose your poison. Or, just choose what is appealing and go with it. The supposed "evidence base" on psychotherapies is slim and doubtful from the point of view of ontology (understanding the nature of being) and validity (a representation of reality or truth rather than today's science which is stronger on reliability, that is repeating shared illusions about what we see between raters or across time).

From a philosophical perspective (and I am also a philosopher of psychiatry), we do not have a consensual model of the person, how psychological or psychiatric problems come about and, even tougher, no consensual model of the nature of change. Defining the self is the just the beginning of a conversation about the unresolved problems of psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis (along with all the other attempts to create a theory of persons).

Regards,

Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD. PhD

Vincenzo Di Nicola, I do not understend why do you believe I do not follow your argument.

I fully agree with you that "Behaviour therapy and family therapy set aside the issue of the self in favour of other ways to conceive of therapy".

I fully agree with you that "Defining the self is the just the beginning of a conversation about the unresolved problems of psychology".

I only suggest, unlike you, that if we'll go ahead and make the definition of the self more specific and detailed, the self might become attractive for both behaviour therapy and family therapy, that's all. And why not?

Anyway I'm very grateful for your critical comments on my question. Could you give me some links on the published text(s), where the same point is made?

Michael Uebel, OK, let us imagine that a psychotherapist observes a patient with "the pathological false self",

Could anybody, in your knowledge, offer a definite way to discover this patient's "true self", whatever heathy it is?

This ref may also help: https://www.scribd.com/document/475763747/Foundations-Of-Indian-Psychology-Theories-Concepts-Vol-1-by-R-M-Matthijs-Cornelissen-Girishwar-Misra-Suneet-Varma-z-lib-org