Creative illusion. Double and belief

A demonstration of the role belief plays, as an early, structuring influence, in constituting and differentiating the psychic object. On the basis of the definition of introjection suggested by Ferenczi, the authors develop the idea that the object is initially identified with the ego. Applying the concept of double-of-the-self – double-of-the-mother, the authors extend this paradigm to explain the start of the baby’s relational life, as an element structuring his feeling that he exists. The idea of the double is what makes it possible to bear a disappearance : the thing that disappears is never lost, because the object retains a mark of having been a part of the ego. An analysis of Jung’s childhood phallus dream is a means of studying the psychic consequences caused by the lack of a unitary double.