Concept
Conflict-free ego sphere
Heinz Hartmann's provisional name, proposed in 1939, for the whole set of ego functions that in fact develop and operate outside mental conflict, such as perception, intention, thinking, language, memory and motor development. Hartmann did not claim these functions are untouched by conflict; he argued that psychoanalysis must study how they grow and how they help or hinder the individual in mastering conflict, and not only the ego's defences.
Development
1939
introduced by Heinz Hartmann
Hartmann proposed the term, as a provisional name, in the paper he read to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1937 and published in 1939.
In Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1939)
Relations
- 1939 introduced by Heinz Hartmann
Hartmann proposed the term, as a provisional name, in the paper he read to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1937 and published in 1939.
- 1939 gave rise to Ego autonomy
Hartmann's idea of autonomous ego development grew out of his conflict-free ego sphere: both describe ego functions that cannot be derived from the drives or from conflict.
Works
- 1939
Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation
Heinz Hartmann read this long paper to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on 17 November 1937 and published it in 1939 in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Imago (vol. 24, pp. 62–135). It is the founding statement of psychoanalytic ego psychology. Hartmann recalls that psychoanalysis aims to be a general psychology in the widest sense and notes that analytic ego psychology had so far been mainly a psychology of conflict. He starts from Anna Freud's account of the ego's defences and asks psychoanalysis to study as well the ego functions that develop outside conflict. For these he proposes the provisional name of a conflict-free ego sphere. By this he means not a region of the mind exempt from conflict in principle, but the processes that, in a given person, in practice remain outside it. He argues that the contrast between conflict and peaceful development does not coincide with the contrast between the pathological and the normal. The second half of the paper makes adaptation a central problem of psychoanalytic theory. The ego is the individual's organ of adaptation. Beside Freud's alloplastic and autoplastic change, Hartmann names the choice of a new environment as a third route. He measures adaptedness against average expectable situations and describes the newborn as adapted from its first day to its average expectable surroundings. He also discusses how functions fit together within the ego, ego strength, automatisms, and what all this means for the concept of mental health. David Rapaport's English translation appeared in 1958 as Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation.
- 1964
Essays on Ego Psychology: Selected Problems in Psychoanalytic Theory
This collection of Heinz Hartmann's papers was published in New York by International Universities Press in 1964 (xv + 492 pages). Its twenty chapters span more than three decades, from early clinical and experimental studies of his Vienna years to the theoretical papers of the 1950s in which he developed psychoanalytic ego psychology after Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. Among them are "Psychoanalysis and the Concept of Health" and "Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego", in which he distinguished the ego as a psychic system from the self. Others are "The Mutual Influences in the Development of Ego and Id", "Notes on the Theory of Sublimation", in which he worked out the concept of neutralization, and "Notes on the Reality Principle". Further papers deal with the theory of the drives, rational and irrational action, psychoanalysis and sociology, the application of psychoanalytic concepts to social science, developmental psychology, the technical implications of ego psychology, schizophrenia, infantile neurosis, the development of the ego concept in Freud's work, and psychoanalysis as a scientific theory. The papers of the 1950s gathered here set out his distinction between primary and secondary ego autonomy. The volume also reprints studies on parapraxes in Korsakoff's psychosis, on remembering completed and uncompleted tasks in obsessional neurosis, and on twins. A German edition appeared as Ich-Psychologie: Studien zur psychoanalytischen Theorie.
See also
People
References
- Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation1939Evidence for a relation
- Essays on Ego Psychology: Selected Problems in Psychoanalytic Theory1964Evidence for a relation