The self-object concept was a very tough one for me to understand, but what did help me a lot was his ideas about what he called the "self" being formed on the basis of 3 functions or something like that: grandiosity, idealization, and twinship. And if your parents couldn't provide those -- couldn't be "self-objects" to you maybe -- then your "self" (for myself I like to call it sense of self) can't/doesn't develop well.

That matches a lot with what I finally got diagnosed with. And in fact when I asked her in the beginning what she thought was "wrong" she didn't use the DSM terms, she said that I was "narcissistically wounded and fragmented". I do think she treated the fragmentation -- she was a specialist in dissociative disorders -- but not the "wounded narcissism". And rage would be definitely a part of that, seems to me.

So it all very much sucks. I'm very glad to have PC to vent on and to feel some commonality with other human beings, otherwise I'd probably still be entirely feeling like a worthless, hopeless piece of trash that even my therapist couldn't tolerate.