This is the best summary I’ve seen of this distinction from Ruti’s The Summons of Love pg 64:
Winnicott explains that our inner agility is threatened whenever we feel assaulted by the outside world—whenever we feel traumatized either by our intimate relationships or by a wounding social context. Predictably enough, our usual response to such situations is to set up psychological barriers to protect ourselves against being violated. Such defensive barriers over time congeal into false self-presentations that make us feel reassuringly self-contained even as they gradually deprive us of our existential elasticity; we feel impermeable, and sometimes even invincible, without necessarily being aware of the ways in which we have relinquished our claim on a full bodied life. As our true self slips into hiding behind the false one, we become more and more unyielding, more and more uncompromising, often alienating the people we most care about. Yet, ironically enough, the ultimate goal of the false self is to safeguard the continued viability of the true self in the face of external challenges. In this paradoxical fashion, the false self, though itself utterly incapable of emotional complexity, sustains our latent capacity for such complexity by ensuring that our true self does not get exploited to the point of total suffocation.
Mark Carrigan 