カレン･ダイアン・ジェネットは、彼女の報文の最後を下のような言葉で締めくくっている。

Marcia-Anne Dobresマルシア-アン・ドブレが、McDermottマクダーモットの報文に対して、なされたコメント−議論は尽くされた、最早、新説は現れない−は、正しいのかもしれない。

ビーナス女性小像と云われている考古学的遺物の意味やその機能に関して過去、数世紀にわたって提案され続けてきた数多くの諸説よりも、先史時代の目視できる像の多義の性質に関する、より良い議論・論拠はありえないであろう。

さて、では、その注目すべき、LeRoy McCermottの説を、順次、紹介しよう。

Self representation is the image the subject has of him or herself based on his or her own interpretation. It is one of the factors of the ego and its representation as termed "an individual, differentiated, real, and permanent entity" (Racamier) particularized by a distinctive history and modes of feeling, thinking, and doing.

This accounts for Heinz Hartmann's distinction between, on the one hand, the ego as a function and the self as the object of narcissistic investment, and, on the other, "object representations" and "self representations," meaning the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious representations of the corporeal and mental self within the system of the ego, representations that are invested with both libidinal and destructive energy to become love objects and objects of hatred.

Jacques Lacan took a different approach. In "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" (1949/2004), he described the mirror stage as "a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that extends from a fragmented image of the body to what I call "orthopedic" form of its totality?and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure" (p. 6).

Thus self representation is just of one aspect of the subject's representations, marked by its belonging to the ego?that is, its insertion into reality, the aim of a con-substantial coherence with its narcissistic dimension and the lure it implies. To varying degrees it can be destabilized, called into question, unmasked by desires and conflicts, or seriously disturbed. The latter may take the form of the radical self-depreciation of melancholia, the overvaluation of self in mania, or a collapse into schizophrenia, where a more or less delusional new self representationis reconstituted as savior of the world, self-procreator of all human lineages, of other such variant. Other less dramatic but particularly trying forms occur when the self representation is called into question in borderline states or transformed into transsexualism.

Any existential crisis, particularly in adolescence, can challenge or cause serious disturbances in self representation. These occur in anorexia, bulimia, dysmorphophobia (fear of deformity), or psychotic decompensation, all considered by American authors as defects in self-representation or as pathologies of identity (Erikson). Among the various elaborations proposed by authors who espouse Hartmann's conception, Edith Jacobson's has the merit of showing the correlation between the self and the object world, between identity and the feeling of identity within a framework that combines individuation and identification, and thus grants a determining role to the unconscious.