The Core Self in Psychoanalytic Literature and Its Benign and Ideal Dimensions

Abstract

The author garners support in psychoanalytic literature for the conceptualization of a core self with transcendent properties and the ca- pacity to experience a communal sense of union. This core self is thought to contain a dual track notion of self/other experience in which the boundaries of self and other are paradoxically differentiated and yet identical. Rather than pathological, this self/no-self experience is unitive and unambivalent and leads to ecstatic experience of transcendence and communion with benign capacities. The author draws from psychoanalysis and from Plotinian philosophy to frame the core self with its loving capacities as ultimately benign and ideal and as originary experience embedded in our deepest nature. All character defects, faults and malevolent affects and experience are considered permutations of the positive elements of core self experience. The author suggests a goal of psychoanalysis can be the liberation of this core self from the shroud of negative affects and character faults. Through the containment and transformation of negative affect and experience, the eventual discovery of the numinous sublime qualities of the core self may emerge.