ABSTRACT
In some respects the history of the psychoanalytic movement can be read as a progressive effort to understand the unique situation that Sigmund Freud invented and psychoanalysts inherit. This chapter shows the psychic movement that takes place when the analysand is free to use the psychoanalyst as an object through whom to articulate and elaborate Donald Winnicott's personality idiom. Winnicott defined the true self as “the inherited potential which is experiencing a continuity of being, and acquiring in its own way and at its own speed a personal psychic reality and a personal body scheme”. The spontaneous gesture was evidence of true self, and Winnicott found its earliest manifestations in the muscle erotism of the foetus. In-formative object relating at a later period of psychic development may result in the child mentally representing attitudes, actions, and other communications from the parent.
