Concept
Self-representation
The mental image a person forms of their own self, set against object representations, the images formed of other people. Heinz Hartmann proposed the term in 1950 when he separated the ego, a mental structure, from the self, the whole person, and redefined narcissism as the libidinal investment of the self rather than of the ego. Edith Jacobson and later Otto Kernberg made self- and object representations central to their accounts of development and pathology.
Read more- Introduced by
- Heinz Hartmann
- Key works
- 3
introduced by
- Heinz Hartmann 1950 In his 1950 paper Hartmann distinguished the ego from the self, defined narcissism as the libidinal investment of the self, and proposed "self-representation" as the counterpart of object representation.
developed by
- Edith Jacobson 1964 In "The Self and the Object World" (1964) Jacobson made the formation and differentiation of self- and object representations the core of her account of early development, identification and depression.
- Otto F. Kernberg 1976 Kernberg treated units of self-representation, object representation and the affect linking them as the building blocks of psychic structure in "Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis" (1976).