ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the risks inherent in according both theoretical status and clinical application to Donald Winnicott's creative, essentially poetic perception of psychic disturbance in terms of a "split" into "True" and "False" "Self". Winnicott mentions strong historical and contemporary precedents which tend to focus on the "False" element, with the attendant need to conceptualize "True". The healthy, undamaged personality is elsewhere referred to by Winnicott less as a "True" Self than as a "unit" Self. Thus, the articulation of a "split" between "True" and "False" Self is born of pathology, of psychic disturbance. Thus, the metaphor of a True/False split actually issued from conscious lived moments between Winnicott and his patients, as "an idea which our patients give us". Winnicott is, therefore, concerned to distinguish between his devised aetiology of the False Self—which refers primarily to its persistent unconscious levels of functioning—and the more conscious manifestations, readily identified by both patient and therapist together as a False Self defence.
