The true self (also known as real self, authentic self, original self and vulnerable self) and the false self (also known as fake self, idealized self, superficial self and pseudo self) are a psychological dualism conceptualized by English psychoanalyst
Donald Winnicott
Donald Woods Winnicott (7 April 1896 – 25 January 1971) was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of object relations theory and developmental psychology. He was a leading member of the Briti ...
.
Winnicott used "true self" to denote a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, having a real self with little to no contradiction. "False self", by contrast, denotes a sense of self created as a defensive façade,
which in extreme cases can leave an individual lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty behind an inconsistent and incompetent appearance of being real, such as in
narcissism
Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive interest in one's physical appearance or image and an excessive preoccupation with one's own needs, often at the expense of others.
Narcissism exists on a co ...
.
Characteristics
In his work, Winnicott saw the "true self" as stemming from self-perception in early infancy, such as awareness of tangible aspects of being alive, like blood pumping through veins and lungs inflating and deflating with breathing—what Winnicott called ''simply being''. Out of this, an infant begins to guarantee that these elements are constant, and regards its life as an essential
reality
Reality is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is only imaginary. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence. In physical terms, r ...
. After birth, the baby's spontaneous, nonverbal gestures derive from that
instinct
Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behaviour, containing both innate (inborn) and learned elements. The simplest example of an instinctive behaviour is a fixed action pattern (FAP), in which a v ...
ual sense,
and if responded to kindly and with affirmation by the parents, become the basis for the continuing development of the true self.
However, when what Winnicott was careful to describe as
good enough parenting—i.e., not necessarily perfect—was ''not'' in place, the infant's spontaneity was in danger of being encroached on by the need for compliance with the parents' wishes/expectations. The result could be the creation of what Winnicott called the "false self", where "other people's expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one's being". The danger he saw was that "through this false self, the infant builds up a false set of relationships, and by means of introjections even attains a show of being real", while, in fact, merely concealing a barren emptiness behind an independent-seeming façade.
The danger was particularly acute where the baby had to provide attunement for the mother/parents, rather than vice versa, building up a sort of dissociated recognition of the object on an impersonal, not personal and spontaneous basis. But while such a pathological false self stifled the spontaneous gestures of the true self in favour of a lifeless imitation, Winnicott nevertheless considered it of vital importance in preventing something worse: the annihilating experience of the exploitation of the hidden true self itself.
Precursors
Helene Deutsch
Helene Deutsch (née Rosenbach; 9 October 1884 – 29 March 1982) was a Polish American psychoanalyst and colleague of Sigmund Freud. She founded the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1935, she immigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where sh ...
, a colleague of
Freud
Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts in ...
, had previously described "as if" personalities, pseudo-relationships substituting for real ones. Winnicott's analyst,
Joan Riviere
Joan Hodgson Riviere (28 June 1883 – 20 May 1962) was a British psychoanalyst, who was both an early translator of Freud into English and an influential writer on her own account.
Life and career
Riviere was born Joan Hodgson Verrall in Bri ...
, had also explored the concept of the narcissist's masquerade, which is essentially a superficial assent concealing a subtle hidden struggle for control. Freud's own late theory of the ego as the product of identifications came close to viewing it only as a false self; while Winnicott's true/false distinction has also been compared to
Michael Balint ,
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, birth_name = Mihály Maurice Bergsmann
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, birth_place = Budapest
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, death_place = London
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's "basic fault" and to
Ronald Fairbairn
William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn () FRSE (11 August 1889 – 31 December 1964) was a Scottish psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and a central figure in the development of the Object Relations Theory of psychoanalysis. He usually used, and was known as ...
's notion of the "compromised ego".
Erich Fromm
Erich Seligmann Fromm (; ; March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the U ...
, in his 1941 book ''
The Fear of Freedom
''Escape from Freedom'' is a book by the Frankfurt-born psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, first published in the United States by Farrar & Rinehart in 1941 with the title ''Escape from Freedom'' and a year later as ''The Fear of Freedom'' in UK by Rou ...
'' distinguished between original self and pseudo self—the inauthenticality of the latter being a way to escape the loneliness of freedom; while much earlier existentialists such as
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard ( , , ; 5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on ...
had claimed that "to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair"—the despair of choosing "to be another than himself".
Karen Horney
Karen Horney (; ; 16 September 1885 – 4 December 1952) was a German psychoanalyst who practised in the United States during her later career. Her theories questioned some traditional Freudian views. This was particularly true of her theories of ...
, in her 1950 book, ''
Neurosis and Human Growth'', based her idea of "true self" and "false self" through the view of self-improvement, interpreting it as real self and ideal self, with the real self being what one currently is and the ideal self being what one could become.
(See also
Karen Horney § Theory of the self).
Later developments
The second half of the twentieth century has seen Winnicott's ideas extended and applied in a variety of contexts, both in psychoanalysis and beyond.
Kohut
Kohut extended Winnicott's work in his investigation of narcissism, seeing narcissists as evolving a defensive armor around their damaged inner selves. He considered it less pathological to identify with the damaged remnants of the self, than to achieve coherence through identification with an external personality at the cost of one's own autonomous creativity.
Lowen
Alexander Lowen identified narcissists as having a true and a false, or superficial, self. The false self rests on the surface, as the self presented to the world. It stands in contrast to the true self, which resides behind the facade or image. This true self is the feeling self, but for the narcissist the feeling self must be hidden and denied. Since the superficial self represents submission and conformity, the inner or true self is rebellious and angry. This underlying rebellion and anger can never be fully suppressed since it is an expression of the life force in that person. But because of the
denial
Denial, in ordinary English usage, has at least three meanings: asserting that any particular statement or allegation is not true (which might be accurate or inaccurate); the refusal of a request; and asserting that a true statement is not true. ...
, it cannot be expressed directly. Instead it shows up in the narcissist's
acting out
In the psychology of defense mechanisms and self-control,
acting out is the performance of an action considered bad or anti-social. In general usage, the action performed is destructive to self or to others. The term is used in this way in sexual ...
. And it can become a perverse force.
Masterson
James F. Masterson argued that all the
personality disorders
Personality disorders (PD) are a class of mental disorders characterized by enduring maladaptive patterns of behavior, cognition, and inner experience, exhibited across many contexts and deviating from those accepted by the individual's culture ...
crucially involve the conflict between a person's two selves: the false self, which the very young child constructs to please the mother, and the true self. The psychotherapy of personality disorders is an attempt to put people back in touch with their real selves.
Symington
Symington developed Winnicott's contrast between true and false self to cover the ''sources'' of personal action, contrasting an autonomous and a discordant source of action – the latter drawn from the internalisation of external influences and pressures. Thus for example parental dreams of self-glorification by way of their child's achievements can be internalised as an alien discordant source of action. Symington stressed however the ''intentional'' element in the individual's abandoning the autonomous self in favour of a false self or narcissistic mask – something he considered Winnicott to have overlooked.
Vaknin
As part of what has been described as a personal mission to raise the profile of the condition, psychology professor (and self-confessed narcissist) Sam Vaknin has highlighted the role of the false self in narcissism. The false self replaces the narcissist's true self and is intended to shield him from hurt and
narcissistic injury
Narcissistic injury, also known as "narcissistic wound" or "wounded ego" are emotional traumas that overwhelm an individual's defense mechanisms and devastate their pride and self worth. In some cases the shame or disgrace is so significant that t ...
by self-imputing omnipotence. The narcissist pretends that his false self is real and demands that others affirm this
confabulation
In psychology, confabulation is a memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. It is generally associated with certain types of brain damage (especially aneurysm in the an ...
, meanwhile keeping his real imperfect true self under wraps.
For Vaknin, the false self is by far more important to the narcissist than his dilapidated, dysfunctional true self; and he does not subscribe to the view that the true self can be resuscitated through therapy.
Miller
Alice Miller cautiously warns that a child/patient may not have ''any'' formed true self, waiting behind the false self facade; and that as a result freeing the true self is not as simple as the Winnicottian image of the butterfly emerging from its cocoon. If a true self can be developed, however, she considered that the empty
grandiosity
In the field of psychology, the term grandiosity refers to an unrealistic sense of superiority, characterized by a sustained view of one's self as better than others, which is expressed by disdainfully criticising them (contempt), overinflating ...
of the false self could give way to a new sense of autonomous vitality.
Orbach: false bodies
Susie Orbach saw the false self as an overdevelopment (under parental pressure) of certain aspects of the self at the expense of other aspects – of the full potential of the self – producing thereby an abiding distrust of what emerges spontaneously from the individual himself or herself. Orbach went on to extend Winnicott's account of how environmental failure can lead to an inner splitting of mind and body, so as to cover the idea of the false body – falsified sense of one's own body. Orbach saw the female false body in particular as built upon identifications with others, at the cost of an inner sense of authenticity and reliability. Breaking up a monolithic but false body-sense in the process of therapy could allow for the emergence of a range of authentic (even if often painful) body feelings in the patient.
Jungian persona
Jungians have explored the overlap between Jung's concept of the
persona
A persona (plural personae or personas), depending on the context, is the public image of one's personality, the social role that one adopts, or simply a fictional Character (arts), character. The word derives from Latin, where it originally ref ...
and Winnicott's false self; but, while noting similarities, consider that only the most rigidly defensive persona approximates to the pathological status of the false self.
Stern's tripartite self
Daniel Stern considered Winnicott's sense of "going on being" as constitutive of the core, pre-verbal self. He also explored how language could be used to reinforce a false sense of self, leaving the true self linguistically opaque and disavowed. He ended, however, by proposing a three-fold division of social, private, and of disavowed self.
Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr, (born 1943) is an American Franciscan priest and writer on spirituality based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was ordained to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church in 1970. In 2011, PBS called him "one of the most popular s ...
explores the spiritual dimensions of the concept of True self and False self in his book Immortal Diamond.
Criticisms
Neville Symington
Neville Symington (3 July 1937 - 3 December 2019) was a member of the Middle Group of British Psychoanalysts which argues that the primary motivation of the child is object-seeking rather than drive gratification. He published a number of books ...
criticised Winnicott for failing to integrate his false self insight with the theory of
ego and id. Similarly, continental analysts like
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis ibé(15 January 1924 – 15 January 2013) was a French philosopher, writer, editor and psychoanalyst.
Career
A student of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pontalis became a professor of philosophy in the forties, before undergoing an an ...
have made use of true/false self as a ''clinical'' distinction, while having reservations about its theoretical status.
The philosopher
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how ...
took issue more broadly with the concept of a true self on the
anti-essentialist grounds that the self was a construct – something one had to evolve through a process of subjectification, an ''aesthetics'' of self-formation, not something simply waiting to be uncovered: "we have to create ourselves as a work of art".
Literary examples
*
Emily Brontë
Emily Jane Brontë (, commonly ; 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, ''Wuthering Heights'', now considered a classic of English literature. She also published a book of poet ...
's ''
Wuthering Heights
''Wuthering Heights'' is an 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, initially published under her pen name Ellis Bell. It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moorland, moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their tur ...
'' has been interpreted in terms of the true self's struggle to break through the false self, and the social overlay that makes the false self socially acceptable.
*
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, ''The ...
's poetry has been interpreted in terms of the conflict of the true self and the false self.
* In
Joanne Greenberg
Joanne Greenberg (born September 24, 1932, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American author who published some of her work under the pen name of Hannah Green. She was a professor of anthropology at the Colorado School of Mines and a volunteer Emerge ...
's ''
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden'', the heroine sees her outward personality as a mere ghost of a Semblance, behind which her true self hides more completely.
See also
References
Further reading
* D. W. Winnicott, ''Playing and Reality'' (London 1971)
* Jan Abram and Knud Hjulmand, ''The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of Winnicott's Use of Words'' (London 2007)
* Susie Orbach, 'Working with the False Body', in A. Erskine/D. Judd eds., ''The Imaginative Body'' (London 1993)
External links
Self (True/False)* The Wikiversity course
Unmasking the True Self
{{Psychology
Conceptions of self
Psychoanalytic terminology
Narcissism