Concept
Neutralization
In Heinz Hartmann's ego psychology, the process by which the energy of the sexual and aggressive drives is changed from an instinctual into a non-instinctual mode, so that the ego can use it for its own functions. Hartmann treated neutralization as a broader version of Freud's sublimation and desexualization, extended to aggression, and saw the capacity to neutralize as a measure of ego strength.
Development
1950
introduced by Heinz Hartmann
Hartmann introduced neutralized drive energy in his 1950 paper on the psychoanalytic theory of the ego and worked it out in his 1955 paper on sublimation.
In Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego (1950);Notes on the Theory of Sublimation (1955)
Relations
- 1950 introduced by Heinz Hartmann
Hartmann introduced neutralized drive energy in his 1950 paper on the psychoanalytic theory of the ego and worked it out in his 1955 paper on sublimation.
- 1955 derives from Sublimation
In "Notes on the Theory of Sublimation" (1955) Hartmann recast Freud's sublimation as one case of a more general neutralization of drive energy, covering aggression as well as libido.
Works
- 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.
- 1955
Notes on the Theory of Sublimation
This paper began as Heinz Hartmann's introduction to the Panel on Sublimation at the Midwinter Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York on 4 December 1954. It was published in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child in 1955 (vol. 10, pp. 9–29) and reprinted in his Essays on Ego Psychology (1964). In it Hartmann recasts Freud's concept of sublimation in the terms of ego psychology. At its centre is neutralization, which he defines as the change of both libidinal and aggressive energy away from the instinctual and toward a non-instinctual mode, and which he takes to be essential to what is usually called sublimation. Freud had held that the ego works with desexualized energy. Hartmann extends this to aggression and holds that neutralized energy may come from both drives, and probably from the ego as well. The term sublimation may be kept for the neutralization of libido, as Freud used it, or widened into a synonym for neutralization. Neutralization comes in many shades, along a continuum from fully instinctual to fully neutralized energy, and the capacity to neutralize varies from person to person. Neutralization offers an alternative to turning aggression either outward or against the self, and self-preservation, as a function of the ego, depends on it. Hartmann refuses to define sublimation by normality, but he allows that the capacity for sublimation is correlated with health and illness. He ties neutralization to the secondary autonomy of ego functions. Later critics questioned the transformations of psychic energy that the theory assumes.
See also
People
References
- Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego1950Evidence for a relation
- Notes on the Theory of Sublimation1955Evidence for a relation