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.