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Ego psychology

Also known as Ich-PsychologiePsychoanalytic ego psychologyPsychologie du moi

A school of psychoanalysis that makes the ego, and not only the drives and repressed unconscious, its main object of study. Building on Freud's structural theory and Anna Freud's account of the mechanisms of defence, Heinz Hartmann argued in 1939 that psychoanalysis should also study ego functions such as perception, thinking, memory and motility that develop outside conflict, and should treat the ego's adaptation to its environment as a central problem. With Ernst Kris and Rudolph Loewenstein he set out to make psychoanalysis a general psychology. The school dominated American psychoanalysis from the 1940s into the 1970s, and Jacques Lacan made it a main target of his critique.

Narrower concepts: Adaptation
Conflict-free ego sphere
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Key works: 3

developed by

Heinz Hartmann 1939 In "Ich-Psychologie und Anpassungsproblem" Hartmann called for widening Freud's ego psychology to the ego functions that cannot be derived from the drives, and his later papers, collected in "Essays on Ego Psychology" (1964), built this into a general theory of the ego.

critiqued by

Jacques Lacan 1966 Across the papers collected in "Écrits" (1966), Lacan attacked the ego psychology of Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein, arguing that strengthening an autonomous, adapted ego betrays Freud's discovery of the unconscious.