Concept
Ego psychology
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.
Development
1939
developed by Heinz Hartmann
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.
In Essays on Ego Psychology: Selected Problems in Psychoanalytic Theory (1964);Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1939)
1966
critiqued by Jacques Lacan
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.
In Écrits (1966)
Relations
- 1939 developed by Heinz Hartmann
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.
- 1966 critiqued by Jacques Lacan
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.
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.
- 1966
Lacan's collected papers, published by Éditions du Seuil in 1966: a volume of some nine hundred pages gathering articles and essays written over three decades, from 1936 to 1966. It includes the text on the mirror stage given at Zurich in 1949; the Rome discourse of 1953, 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis', which has been called the founding manifesto of Lacanianism; 'The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious' (1957); and the 1958 essay on the treatment of psychosis. Across these papers Lacan pursues his return to Freud by way of structural linguistics, reading the unconscious as structured like a language, and turns against the ego psychology of Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein. The book became a bestseller in France and made Lacan known as 'the French Freud', while also fixing his reputation for difficulty. Its first complete English translation, by Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, was published by W. W. Norton in 2006.
See also
People
References
- Essays on Ego Psychology: Selected Problems in Psychoanalytic Theory1964Evidence for a relation
- Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation1939Evidence for a relation
- Écrits1966Evidence for a relation