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.