ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concept of self and self-experience as it actualizes in clinical work with patients. The concept of self has preoccupied analytic theoreticians more and more during the past decade, especially in Anglo-Saxon English-speaking cultures. The analytic researchers have the existentialist philosophers, especially those from France and Germany, as their pacemakers, even though quite often they are overtly unaware of this literature. Clinically, the self-experience of the patient is characterized by a very archaic and simple state of excitement, expressed often by motility. What it demands is mutuality-that is, shared trust. Its typical anxiety affect is threat of annihilation and its pervasive defence mechanism is staying dissociated and hidden, not repressed. Its domain is privacy. The aetiology of the dislocation of self, as Winnicott pointed out, starts always from maladaptive environmental care. Researchers encounter the self of a patient clinically only in moments of true regression to dependence and holding.
