the Dalai Lama, explains it this way: the point of selflessness, of talking about no-self,
is not that something that existed in the past no longer exists, but that this kind of
self never existed at all. It is necessary to recognize the non-existence of something
that has never existed but was only imagined. This may lead to an experience which
may, at first, be painful rather than oceanic.
In the psychoanalytical perspective, ‘self’ is seen, in general, as a central organizer in
the psychological universe of every human being, from which our identity and its
accompanying ‘otherness’ emerge. We talk about consistency, coherence and
continuity in the experiencing of the self, about ‘true self and ‘false self’. In this view
one suffers a great problem when lacking self-coherence or self-esteem. When viewing
many serious afflictions (e.g. autism, psychoses, borderline and narcissistic problems)
we speak of disorders, stagnation, or regression in the shaping of a cohesive, integrated
self-image, as in the case of Ella. In current therapies the emphasis is on the question
of how to make people feel better about themselves, rather than how to deal with
internal conflicts. We now talk about the ‘narcissistic dilemma’: the sense of
estrangement, or ‘falseness’ in the sense of not being real, linked with either idealizing
or devaluing others or oneself, with self-exaltation or self-contempt as poles of this
false self-image.
Self can be seen as the representation of a function of coherence, continuity, agency
and relationship that allows us to perceive ourselves as a single, integrated, subjective
embodiment.
In psychoanalysis, we use, one could say, ‘self’ as a help-construction in our
endeavour to understand the person in being, suffering, enjoying, hoping, learning,
and development. Developmentally, we understand the self as a function which is
grounded in embodiment and the experiences of self-reflexivity that are typical of
humans.
The analyst Nina Coltart puts her cheerful comment on this in the form of a
limerick (1996:139):
A Buddhist once said: ‘To deny
That this I is an I is a lie;
For if it is not,
I should like to know what
Is the thing that says: “I am not I”’.The problem is that, while we make a representation of an ever-changing function,
we imagine this representation as a fixed ‘thing’. We tend to create a fixed self in the
same way we create objects. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch argue that ‘this grasping
after an inner ground is itself a moment in a larger pattern of grasping that includes
our clinging to an outer ground in the form of an idea of a pregiven and independent
world. In other words, our grasping after a ground, whether inner or outer, is the
deep source of frustration and anxiety’ (Varela et al. 1991:143).
94 ADELINE VAN WANING