The Pseudo-Self

Speaker: Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP

There is a type of patient who haunts psychoanalysis from the margins, never settling into existing diagnostic categories but never completely disappearing either. Variously referred to as “normotic” (Bollas, 1987, McDougall, 1978, 1985), “false self” (Winnicott, 1960), and the “as if” personality (Deutsch, 1942), this patient confounds conventional classificatory schemas because while ostensibly high-functioning, verbal, cooperative, with reality-testing intact and not necessarily any major trauma history, it eventually emerges that something fundamental – the capacity to feel their feelings – is missing, dysfunctional, non-existent. It can be nearly impossible to detect the problem, not least because an “absence” is its defining feature, but also because the patient rarely complains about the problem (of not feeling their feelings) either. Whereas under ordinary circumstances, the patient’s emotional dissatisfactions are the engine propelling treatment forward, however ambivalently and inconsistently (Freud, 1937), in these cases, the patient suffers from a mechanical problem of precisely this kind – a disconnection from authentic feelings – that makes the awareness of dissatisfaction elusive and unlikely.

In what follows, Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP, focuses on the “pseudo-self” – a particular variation of dissociative organization in which normality and functionality camouflage the absence of emotional authenticity. Ashtor explores the connection between this unique personality organization and today’s neoliberal regime where disconnection, speed, and efficiency are hailed as the optimal features of successful personhood. Our field’s continued inability to reckon with the pervasive problems of the “pseudo-self” makes us complicit with a damaged culture that is dehumanizing and disconnected.