Self - por Donald W. Winnicott

In regard to this article, the main thing has to do with the word self. I did wonder if I could write something out about this word, but of course as soon as I came to do it I found that there is much uncertainty even in my own mind about my own meaning. I found I had written the following:

For me the self, which is not the ego, is the person who is me, who is only me, who has totality based on the operation of the maturational process. At the same time the direction interior-exterior in the course of the operation of the maturational process, aided as it must be (maximally at the beginning) by the human environment which holds and handles and in a live way facilities. The self finds itself the body or the body from it. The self essentially recognizes itself in the eyes and facial expression of the mother and in the mirror which can come to represent the mother’s face. Eventually the self arrives at a significant relationship between the child and the sum of the identifications which (after enough of incorporation and introjection of m ental representations) become organized in the shape of an internal psychic living reality. The relationship between the boy of girl with his or her own internal psychic organization becomes modified according to the expectations that are displayed by the father and mother and those who have become significant in the external life of the individual. It is the self and the life of the self that alone makes sense of action or of living from the point of view of the individual who has grown so far and who is continuing to grow from dependence and immaturity towards independence, and the capacity to identify with mature love objects without loss of individual identity.

You may find this unhelpful but at any rate it seemed to me to be a valuable thing to do to try to write it down. Certainly I might want to alter it.

You of course are left with the same word that you would use to translate the ego. Let me try to be more helpful. I think that the user of the term self is on a different platform from the user the term ego. The first platform has to do with life and living in a direct way; the second, where the word le moi is used, the speaker or writer is more detached, less involved, perhaps clearer because of being able to use all that there is of the intellectual approach.

I fell that your use of the word le moi corporel way be necessary but one would like to leave it that the self is not always putting emphasis on the body to the exclusion of a more abstract self that certainly does, however, belong to the concept of a healthy functioning brain.


Dr. Donald W. Winnicott 

In: Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse (Lieux du corps), N. 3, Printemps, 1971, p. 47-48.