Clients sometimes bring into therapy a vague and unsettling feeling: I don’t know who I am. Life may look accomplished enough from the outside: you have played your role, been responsible, dependable, effective. Yet something about you feels false, to yourself. Perhaps to others too: you may come across as a little stilted, somehow unavailable for spontaneity or actual connection. It is as if your outward-facing self is almost separate, a mask that you present to the world, not an expression of who you actually are.
Winnicott described this character formulation as the False Self. It develops when an infant learns early on that being acceptable requires adaptation and compliance, in the place of carefree play or absorption in the experience of childhood. The self that is shown to others becomes organised around what is needed, expected, or rewarded. This sets the direction of the development of their personality, at the cost of the development of what Winnicott termed their True Self – the sense of self that would emerge organically from an “un-impinged upon” experience of childhood.
Fast forward to adulthood, and stereotypical examples come to mind. The reliably available, self-sacrificing woman; the stoic, industrious man who holds everything together. These ways of being are not failures; they are often highly successful according to convention and external evaluation. But they may come at the cost of an internal experience of being and knowing who they are.
The False Self may function so effectively that it is mistaken for the whole person. Others relate to it, respond to it – and it responds back to them. Meanwhile, what Winnicott called the True Self remains relatively unknown, even to the person themselves. This can produce a peculiar sense of living at a remove from one’s own life, of going through the motions of being oneself or pretending to be the person one might have been if it had been given the chance to do so. At its extreme, this experience can even feel like not existing.
Some degree of social adaptation is of course unavoidable and even obligatory. Our shared lives depends on rituals, roles, and compromise. The problem arises when adaptation becomes excessive or even total, and the inner, subjective sense of “me” is eclipsed by the outer façade. Therapy often begins at the point where this is first admitted: I don’t know who I am. Or, I don’t quite feel real.
Therapy in this case is not about dismantling the False Self so much as acknowledging its dominance and allowing something less compliant and more spontaneous to re-emerge. Desires, needs, anger, solitude, and other aspects of the self that were once too risky, unwelcome, or futile to express. In that free space, a client may start to discover a more directly felt yet less rigid sense of being “me”, one that is not an externally oriented role but an inner experience of existing merely as oneself, without armour.
