ABSTRACT
The extension of the false self to include a false body illuminates current difficulties in our understanding of psychosomatic development, as well as opening up the analyst's bodily experiences as an important but often neglected dimension of clinical work. D. W. Winnicott's project addressed the essence of what it is to be human. In his sensitive, thoughtful, intelligent, and sensual technical writing, he touches and transforms our understanding of human consciousness and agency in both a mental and a physical sense, curling into mental spaces that had previously lain undescribed. If the false self is created in relation to the mother's or caregiver's psychology, then the false body is similarly a relational construct. The possibility of a true body cannot emerge until there is a relationship to receive it. Winnicott tried to flesh out what were felt as distinctive self states that in the course of a therapy could come to a less troublesome state of being.
