Concept
Ego autonomy
In ego psychology, the relative independence of ego functions from the drives. Heinz Hartmann first spoke in 1939 of an area of autonomous ego development, made up of functions that cannot be derived from the drives, and later distinguished primary autonomy, belonging to inborn apparatuses such as perception, memory and motility, from secondary autonomy. Secondary autonomy belongs to patterns that first arose in conflict, for instance as defences, but through a change of function became stable structures serving adaptation.
Development
1939
Heinz Hartmann introduced by
Hartmann named an area of "autonomous ego development" in 1939 and set out the distinction between primary and secondary autonomy in his papers of the 1950s, collected in "Essays on Ego Psychology".
Relations
- 1939 introduced by Heinz Hartmann
Hartmann named an area of "autonomous ego development" in 1939 and set out the distinction between primary and secondary autonomy in his papers of the 1950s, collected in "Essays on Ego Psychology".
- 1939 derives from Conflict-free ego sphere
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.
- 1950
Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego
Heinz Hartmann's paper, published in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child in 1950 and reprinted in his Essays on Ego Psychology (1964), is one of the founding statements of psychoanalytic ego psychology. Observing that the word "ego" was used ambiguously even among analysts, Hartmann argued that in the structural theory the ego is a psychic system, defined by its functions and set beside the id and the superego, and is not the same as the personality, the individual or the subject's own person. For one's own person, as distinct from the surrounding world, he proposed the term "self", and he spoke of the ego's representations of the self alongside its representations of objects. On this basis he restated Freud's narcissism as the libidinal cathexis not of the ego but of the self, so that the counterpart of object cathexis is the cathexis of one's own person. These distinctions between ego, self and self-representation became standard in American psychoanalysis and served as a starting point for later theories of the self, among them Edith Jacobson's and Heinz Kohut's.
- 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
- Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego1950 Evidence for a relation
- Essays on Ego Psychology: Selected Problems in Psychoanalytic Theory1964 Evidence for a relation
- Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation1939 Evidence for a relation