Under normal conditions, what Hartmann called an average expectable environment, these capacities developed into ego functions and had autonomy from the libidinal and aggressive drives that is, they were not products of frustration and conflict, as Freud (1911) believed. Hartmann (1958) believed the ego included innate capacities for such things as perception, attention, memory, concentration, motor coordination, and language. Hartmann’s contributions broadened the scope of psychoanalytic concerns, from psychopathology to general human development, from an isolated, self-contained treatment method to a sweeping intellectual discipline among other disciplines (p. Mitchell and Black (1995) write “Hartmann powerfully affected the course of psychoanalysis, opening up a crucial investigation of the key processes and vicissitudes of normal development. Through his assiduous study of ego functions and how an individual adapts to his or her environment, Hartmann created both a general psychology and a clinical instrument with which an analyst could evaluate an individual’s functioning and formulate appropriate therapeutic interventions. The modifications made by Freud in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety formed the basis of a psychoanalytic psychology interest in the nature and functions of the ego.įollowing Freud, the psychoanalyst most responsible for the development of ego psychology was Heinz Hartmann (1958). Instead of being passive and reactive to the id, the ego was now a formidable counterweight to it, responsible for regulating id impulses, as well as integrating an individual’s functioning into a coherent whole. In this essay, Freud revised his theory of anxiety as well as delineating a more robust ego. Not long after The Ego and the Id, Freud (1926) published Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. ![]() Freud’s ego at this stage was relatively passive and weak he described it as the helpless rider on the id’s horse, more or less obliged to go where the id wished to go (Meissner, 159). The ego was still organized around conscious perceptual capacities, yet it now had unconscious features responsible for repression and other defensive operations. In what came to be called the structural theory, the ego was now a formal component of a three-way system that also included the id and superego. This posed a significant problem for his topographic theory, which he resolved with the publication of his essay The Ego and the Id (1923). He also introduced attention and memory as ego functions.įreud began to notice that not all unconscious phenomena could be attributed to the id it appeared as if the ego had unconscious aspects as well. ![]() By 1911, he referenced ego instincts for the first time in Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning and contrasted them with sexual instincts: ego instincts responded to the reality principle while sexual instincts obeyed the pleasure principle. He thought of the ego as synonymous with consciousness and contrasted it with the repressed unconscious. Sigmund Freud initially considered the ego to be a sense organ for perception of both external and internal stimuli. Proponents of ego psychology focus on the ego’s normal and pathological development, its management of libidinal and aggressive impulses, and its adaptation to reality. Many psychoanalysts use a theoretical construct called the ego to explain how that is done through various ego functions. An individual interacts with the external world as well as responds to internal forces. ![]() Ego psychology is a school of psychoanalysis rooted in Sigmund Freud’s structural id-ego-superego model of the mind.
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