Trauma and Selfhood

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Polonius advises Laertes, “To thine own self be true.” William James wrote, “Thoughts connected as we feel to be connected are what we mean by personal selves.” Philosophical speculations about the self, its boundaries, our sense of other and where or how the “self” fits into theories of mind have been age-old preoccupations, tied as they are to the unsolved mysteries of consciousness.

Multiple constructs are used by various authors to denote an individual's psychological representation of self. When Sigmund Freud spoke of the self, he called it the soul; however, the word was lost in translation and his three provinces of the soul—“I,” “it,” and “above-I”—became the ego, id, and superego, and what Freud called the structure of the soul became mental apparatus. Freud added to an enduring definitional confusion by talking of the self in two senses: the self as the whole person and as being simply the ego or agency of the mind. The ego is but one of a number of overlapping terms used to denote a form of self-representation with others including self-object, self-concept, self-image, identity, identity state, and so on. James F. Masterson viewed the ego as the executive arm of the self, adding that it was more than this in that it also regulated the balance between id, ego, and superego.

Heinz Kohut, whose seminal writings formed the basis for self psychology, always resisted a simple definition of self. Kohut's work began with narcissistically disturbed individuals he was analyzing and the realization that the ego psychology model of his day did not well inform the theory of pathogenesis or treatment of his patients. He noted that his patients formed two types of transferences in particular. In the mirror transference, the patient looked to the analyst for a validating and confirming response for actions that were akin to the phase-appropriate displays of exhibitionism of the small child and in doing so opened a window for the empathically attuned analyst to visualize the emergent lack of self-worth and wholeness of the child who desperately sought the needed maternal approbation. In the idealizing transference, the therapist is seen as an all-powerful healing and soothing parent, and as with the mirroring transference, it points the way to childhood strivings that had been disrupted. A major issue here was the failed empathic responsiveness from persons central to the child's development [Page 694]and who were needed to provide what Kohut termed self-object functions, an internalized experience that invigorates or strengthens the self, but the absence of which result in developmental arrest.

Although Daniel N. Stern noted in his 1985 book The Interpersonal World of the Infant that no one could agree exactly on what the self is, his qualified attempt at a definition is well informed by his work as a psychoanalyst and developmental researcher. He observes that as adults we have