The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 56, No. 3, 1996

Visions of the Self Edited by Althea J. Homer, Ph.D. With the archetype of the collective unconscious Jung provides a concept to account for the genetic givens that are ignored by many psychoanalytic developmental theorists. In a previous contribution to this series, I wrote about what I call the intrinsic self, personality givens obvious to devoted baby watchers such as mothers, grandmothers, and fathers too. When the self that evolves within the earliest relational context is significantly divergent from the intrinsic self, conflict is experienced at all levels--conscious and unconscious, affective and cognitive. In a later contribution to a new series for this Journal--"The Voice of the Analyst"--I refer to the patient's search to find his/her own voice and his/her own way. These conscious phenomena will be connected at the deepest level with the intrinsic self. Winnicott speaks of the true self as manifest in the infant's spontaneous gesture, one of a number of attempts to account for the psychic givens and contributions of the infant to his/her own personhood. In Jung's view this hard-wired self already has a sense of the archetypal mother in place as well. Other than an inborn tendency toward attachment-seeking behavior (Bowlby), object relations theory does not conceptualize a preexisting mother image. From academic psychology we find the infant's preference for the human face over some other design (Fantz), what might be interpreted by a Jungian as the infant's recognition of the archetype. The readiness to see facial features in ambiguous stimuli probably accounts for the reports of the faces of the Virgin Mary appearing in such phenomena as the condensation of steam on bathroom windows as well as the favorite of children, the man in the moon.

As Brookes distinguishes, in Jungian terms, the unconstellated archetypal energy from constellated personal experience, he also calls attention to the problems that arise when these original unconstellated elements are antithetical to determinants derived from the personal experience of the mother. Kohut would speak of the failure of the mother's selfobject function and the child's subsequent failure to achieve a cohesive self, while Winnicott would refer to the split between the true self and the adaptive false self of the child. Crittenden E. Brookes, M.D., is Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of California Medical Center, San Francisco CA, and Assistant Chief, Department of Psychiatry, Mr. Zion Hospital and Medical Center, San Francisco CA. Address correspondenceto Crittenden E. Brookes, M.D., 3674 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, CA 94116-1 710. 343 0002-9548/96/~900-0343509.50/1 9 1996 A~s~x:iation for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

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BROOKES

Jung anticipates ideas of the postmodern thinker with respect to the nature of reality, placing experience--phenomenology--in the prime explanatory position. This paper further highlights the ongoing struggle of theorists and clinicians to find a way to account for the human experience.

AJH

JUNG'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE EVOLVING CONCEPT OF SELF Crittenden E. Brookes

Carl Jung used the term self to refer to the central organizing and "moving" principle of the psyche itself, as a whole, whereas he used ego to refer to that which is commonly referenced by the term self in contemporary self psychology and object-relations theory. This larger Jungian concept of self will be elaborated shortly. It should be noted incidentally that Jung defined the psyche as the totality of all mental processes. He first excluded the unconscious from the concept of psyche, confining the concept strictly to that which is conscious. But he later suggested that the unconscious, and possibly even the physical world, could also be included as an aspect of the psyche. Although the concept of self as currently understood in the non-Jungian world is closely identified with the subjective (phenomenological) "1," a framework for further identification of specific aspects of self-functioning is emerging. Paraphrasing and slightly rearranging Suler (1993), one current framework for identification of distinct but overlapping characteristics (not categories) of the overarching concept of self includes the following breakdown of the concept: (a) the self-as-structure, (b) the experiencing self, (c) the observing self, (d) the willing self, and (e) the superordinate self. The "pathological self" could be added, but is beyond the scope of the present paper. We must remember that each of these are functions or aspects of the self, not distinct and separate categories of the self. Object-relations theory, the move in psychoanalysis from instinct theory toward a phenomenological but still somewhat objectively posited and positivistically oriented theoretical formulation, views the self as "a structure consisting of self and object representations, and the more basic cognitive-affective schemata that comprise these representations," which derive from interactions with significant others, and are often coded as "good" or "bad." "Patterns of [these] representations are consolidated into larger systems that constitute the larger intrapsychic structures which are