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.
Development
1950
introduced by Heinz Hartmann
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.
In Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego (1950)
1964
developed by Edith Jacobson
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.
In The Self and the Object World (1964)
1976
developed by Otto F. Kernberg
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).
In Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis (1976)
Relations
- 1950 introduced by Heinz Hartmann
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.
- 1964 developed by Edith Jacobson
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.
- 1976 developed by Otto F. Kernberg
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).
Works
- 1950
Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego
Heinz Hartmann's paper, published in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child in 1950 and reprinted in his Essays on Ego Psychology (1964), is one of the founding statements of psychoanalytic ego psychology. Observing that the word "ego" was used ambiguously even among analysts, Hartmann argued that in the structural theory the ego is a psychic system, defined by its functions and set beside the id and the superego, and is not the same as the personality, the individual or the subject's own person. For one's own person, as distinct from the surrounding world, he proposed the term "self", and he spoke of the ego's representations of the self alongside its representations of objects. On this basis he restated Freud's narcissism as the libidinal cathexis not of the ego but of the self, so that the counterpart of object cathexis is the cathexis of one's own person. These distinctions between ego, self and self-representation became standard in American psychoanalysis and served as a starting point for later theories of the self, among them Edith Jacobson's and Heinz Kohut's.
- 1976
Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis
Kernberg's second book sets out the theory that underlies his clinical work with borderline patients. Gathering papers from 1966 to 1975 with some new material, it offers what he calls a formulation of psychoanalytic object-relations theory within ego psychology. The starting point is clinical: borderline patients alternate between contradictory states of mind, each fully conscious and each held apart from the other, which neither repression, isolation nor denial explains. Kernberg reads this as splitting, and he builds a model of the mind in which the basic units are internalized object relations: a self-representation and an object-representation joined by an affect. Through introjection, identification and ego identity, these units form the ego, the superego and the id. The theoretical half traces how these units develop. It moves from an undifferentiated early stage, through a stage in which self and object images are still fused, to their differentiation and then to the integration of good and bad images into whole representations of the self and of others, ending in the consolidation of ego and superego. Psychosis, borderline pathology and neurosis are placed at successive points on this line. A chapter on instincts and affects argues that affects are the primary building blocks of motivation, and that libido and aggression are organized out of them over development. A historical chapter places the model among the object-relations theories of Klein, Fairbairn, Jacobson and Mahler, among others. The second half applies the model. Kernberg proposes a classification of character pathology on three levels, higher, intermediate and lower, according to the integration of the superego, whether the defences rest on repression or on splitting, and the quality of object relations and identity. The borderline conditions fall at the lowest level. He updates his approach to the transference and countertransference of borderline patients. In two chapters on love, he treats the capacity to fall in love and to stay in love as a developmental achievement that joins sexual desire with tenderness and with relations to a whole, real person, and he traces how narcissistic and borderline pathology limit it, including in adolescence and middle age. A final chapter extends the theory to small groups and hospital administration, sketching a psychiatric hospital in which treatment, group processes and a functional administration together make up a therapeutic community.
See also
References
- Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego1950Evidence for a relation
- The Self and the Object World1964Evidence for a relation
- Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis1976Evidence for a relation