False Self and True Self

As an analyst, I observe that many people unconsciously develop strategies to survive the family into which they were born. Thus is born the false self.

Often when they enter analysis, they are unhappy and constricted, living provisional lives.

One reason that analysis is so difficult and painful is that those early strategies must be dismantled in order to find the true self. Deconstructing life-long ways of living is de-stabilizing and frightening.

False Self and True Self