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.