ABSTRACT
Donald W. Winnicott places the self at the beginning of life, but when he is referring to a whole self, the birth of the self is located at the stage of concern. For self-awareness to take place, there are some processes that need to emerge out of the state of primary unintegration. The baby is fobbed off by the feed itself; instinct tension disappears, and the baby is both satisfied and cheated. For the self to develop, the aggressive ruthlessness in the infant, which is part of the "primitive love impulse", has to be met by the external environment, the mother, so as to strengthen the self. Thus the themes of self-defence and dissociation culminate in Winnicott’s 1960 paper "Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self". Always with the emphasis on the environment, Winnicott finally comes to combine the true self and the ruthless self of 1954 into the true self of 1960.
