ABSTRACT
Ontologies organize cultural differentiations between “human” and “non-human” and so provide a common identification basis to societies but also general frames for differentiating an “inside” and an “outside” in identification processes. The anthropologist Descola, in Beyond Nature and Culture; University of Chicago Press, 2013) distinguishes four main ontologies, each of them shedding a specific light on different constructions of the human/environment system. “Naturalist” biomedical research itself leads us to reconsider the biological functions of living organisms by including their environmental context in their definition and showing that the concept of “body” can be located in different spaces and times. These views are consistent with the idea of body-environment systems that differ regarding their ontological basis. The concept of Disseminated Self I propose responds to the need to think a “container” for the different envelopes of the human, each organizing a specific inside/outside differentiation and responding to different levels of reality, beyond the classic Freudian opposition between internal and external realities. Psychic envelopes, described particularly by French psychoanalysts (Anzieu, Houzel, Kaës) – or psychic configurations in my model – ensure structural stabilities for the psyche considered as a dynamic system.
