Ego psychology

▪ Germinated in the 1930s in Vienna, was dispersed via the war into
England, and eventually took firm root in America

▪ The ego psychologists shared many concerns with other schools of

psychoanalytic thought:
▪ interpersonal psychoanalysis
▪ object relations theories
▪ self psychology

▪ All these theoretical traditions began to address problems of normal

development and the impact of the environment and early
relationships.
“The Ego and the Id” (Freud, 1923)
▪ EGO
▪ a part of the mind
▪ one of the three fundamental psychic agencies of the mind
ID –EGO – SUPEREGO

➢ The ego - the term used for aspects of mental functioning that regulate and
mediate between the experience of reality and the experience of the person
(Campbell 1989)

➢ The ego’s major functions were to represent reality and, through the
erection of defenses, to channel and control internal drive pressures in the
face of reality (including the demands of social convention and morality)
ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF
DEFENSE THEORY
Anna Freud (1895–1982)
▪ Freud’s third daughter and the youngest of
their six children
▪ A pioneer of child analysis
▪ Her analyst was her father
▪ A crucial figure in the further exploration of
the ego
 ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DEFENSE THEORY
▪ Anna Freud - The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936)
▪ Explored the way the ego interacts with the id, the superego and external reality

▪ In pathological states, the excessive use of defence mechanisms may lead to an

impoverishment of the ego and distort the perception of reality
ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DEFENSE THEORY
▪ Defense mechanisms often function as a central feature of the patient’s larger
personality organization

▪ Anna Freud’s exploration of the ego followed its defensive operations from
symptoms to its infusion into the entire character
▪ aspects of one’s basic style of personality functioning could be rooted in
defensive processes

▪ The defense of reaction formation, whereby the ego obscures unacceptable

hostile impulses by transforming them into their opposite
▪ The angry person becomes overly nice, often insistently helpful, even
suffocatingly kind; he may be regarded by many (including himself) as a
pillar of the community.
 ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DEFENSE THEORY
▪ A redefinition of the role and the focus of the analyst in the
therapeutic process –free association
▪ As much as the patient tries to be cooperative in choosing to suspend ego
attitudes and conscious objections for some period of time, unconscious
defensive patterns and corresponding unconscious superego attitudes are always
operating, outside the patient’s awareness and control

▪ The patient’s ego might be able to comply with (follow) the analyst’s instruction
to free-associate and hold back conscious objections to reporting all that comes
to mind.

▪ The ego also contains complex unconscious defensive arrangements that have
evolved to satisfy the demands of neurotic compromise, ways of thinking that
keep repressed impulses out of conscious awareness in an ongoing way.
ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DEFENSE THEORY
▪ A shift in the analyst’s role. As Anna Freud reconceptualized it:

It is the task of the analyst to bring into consciousness that which is

unconscious, no matter to which psychic institution it belongs. He
directs his attention equally and objectively to the unconscious
elements in all three institutions . . . when he sets about the work of
enlightenment, he takes his stand at a point equidistant from the id,
the ego, and the superego. (1936, p. 28)
ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DEFENSE THEORY
▪ The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (Anna Freud, 1936)
▪ documenting and illustrating various unconscious defensive
strategies of the ego

▪ Anna Freud defined the proper analytic attitude as “neutral”

▪ attention among all three parties in the neurotic construction, the
id, the ego, and the superego
Defense Mechanisms
Defenses have many benign functions:
▪ They begin as healthy, creative adaptations, and they continue to work
adaptively throughout life.
▪ The person using a defense is generally trying unconsciously to accomplish
one or both of the following:
(1) the avoidance or management of some powerful, threatening feeling, usually
anxiety but sometimes overwhelming grief, shame, envy, and other
disorganizing emotional experiences
(2) the maintenance of self-esteem
Defense Mechanisms
Defenses (Phoebe Cramer, 2008)
(1) function outside of awareness
(2) develop in predictable order as children mature
(3) are present in normal personality
(4) become increasingly used in times of stress
(5) reduce the conscious experience of negative emotions
(6) operate via the autonomic nervous system
(7) when used excessively, are associated with psychopathology
Defense Mechanisms
▪ The term “defense mechanism” refers to a mental operation that occurs
outside of awareness.
▪ The function of the defense mechanism is to protect the individual from
experiencing excessive anxiety.
▪ According to the older, classical psychoanalytic theory, such anxiety would
occur if the individual became aware of unacceptable thoughts, impulses, or
wishes.
▪ In contemporary thinking about defenses, an additional function is seen to be
the protection of the self—of self-esteem and, in more extreme cases,
protection of the integration of the self
(Cramer, 1998)
Defense Mechanisms
Primary/Immature Defensive Processes
▪ Extreme Withdrawal
▪ Denial
▪ Omnipotent Control
▪ Extreme Idealization and Devaluation
▪ Projection, Introjection, and Projective Identification
▪ Splitting of the Ego
▪ Somatization
▪ Acting Out (Defensive Enactment)
▪ Sexualization (Instinctualization)
▪ Extreme Dissociation
Defense Mechanisms
Denial
A person does not take in, acknowledge, or believe some aspect of reality.
For example, The dying patient denies the fact of his illness. Or your wife died last
night, but, you believe that your wife is alive.

Projection
In this process an unacceptable feeling, impulse, or idea is attributed to another
person or thing. The person who is projecting has no awareness that the impulse or
idea is his own.
Defense Mechanisms
Splitting of the ego
Kernberg defines it as a primitive defense, seen most often in borderline
patients, that keeps separate the good and bad self and object
representations. Thus, one person is seen as all good, while another is
all bad; or one experiences oneself as all bad, while the other is seen as
all good. The defense is used to protect the object or the self against
aggressive impulses.

Somatization
When young children are not helped by their caregivers to state their
feelings in words, they tend to express them in either depleted bodily
states (illness) or action. Somatization is what analysts have called the
process by which emotional states become expressed physically.
 Defense Mechanisms
Secondary/Mature Defensive Processes
▪ Repression
▪ Regression
▪ Isolation of Affect
▪ Intellectualization
▪ Rationalization
▪ Moralization
▪ Compartmentalization
▪ Undoing
▪ Turning against the Self
▪ Displacement
▪ Reaction Formation
▪ Reversal
▪ Identification
▪ Sublimation
▪ Humor
Defense Mechanisms
Repression
The essence of repression is motivated forgetting or ignoring.
Freud (1915): “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away,
and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious” (p. 146)

Regression
People seem to return to an earlier developmental stage
ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DEFENSE THEORY
Isolation of affect
Conflictual ideas are allowed into consciousness in an intellectualized form;
the disturbing feelings associated with them are blocked.
The ego may permit a flow of ideas that looks like “free” associations, but the
ideas are separated from their corresponding feelings.
A patient might speak of intense sexual encounters, for example, but in a
detached, dispassionate manner.
Defense Mechanisms
Intellectualization
The person using isolation typically reports that he or she has no feelings,
whereas the one who intellectualizes talks about feelings in a way that
strikes the listener as emotionless.
“Well, naturally I have some anger about that,”

Undoing
“Undoing” is a term that means exactly what one would think: the
unconscious effort to counterbalance some affect—usually guilt or
shame—with an attitude or behavior that will magically erase it.
ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DEFENSE THEORY
Anna Freud added two new ones:
▪ “identification with the aggressor”: Coping with fear and trauma by
becoming more like the person(s) causing the fear or expressing
positive feelings toward the aggressor.
▪ “altruistic surrender”: a person avoids anxiety by living vicariously
through someone else
Example: As a child, Laura expressed ambitions of having a
successful career and many children. As an adult, Laura never actively
pursued a career and never had children. She did, however, closely
follow the career developments of her friends and was devoted to their
children.
ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DEFENSE THEORY
▪ Ernst Kris (1900–1957), a graduate of the Vienna Institute who moved to
New York in 1940
▪ He offered an account of his reanalysis of a young man who had undergone
an earlier psychoanalytic treatment along more traditional lines

▪ The patient, a capable scientist in his early thirties, was concerned about
his inability to publish his research, which was impeding his professional
advancement. In his first analysis he had learned that fear and guilt kept
him from being productive. He became aware of a constant pressure to use
other people’s ideas as his own, in particular those of a well-known
scientist friend with whom he spent long hours in conversation.
ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DEFENSE THEORY
▪ The first analysis, which had restricted interpretations to revealing the id
aspects, the unconscious infantile longings inherent in the patient’s neurotic
struggle, had produced improvements, but had not significantly affected the
paralyzing constriction in the patient’s professional life.
ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DEFENSE THEORY
▪ Kris (1951) had added a detailed analysis of the ego’s operations and the
surface behavior of the patient.

The second set of interpretations . . . implemented [those from the first

analysis] by its greater concreteness, by the fact that it covered a large number
of details of behavior and therefore opened the way to linking present and past,
adult symptomatology and infantile fantasy. The crucial point, however, was
the “exploration of the surface.” The problem was to establish how the feeling,
“I am in danger of plagiarizing,” comes about. The procedure did not aim at
direct or rapid access to the id through interpretations; . . . [rather,] various
aspects of behavior were carefully studied. (p. 86)
ANNA FREUD:
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF DEFENSE THEORY
Case: Angela

▪ With Angela, the analyst ignored her provocativeness, commenting instead

that there seemed to be something about having the wall between them
that felt important; she encouraged Angela to tell her about the wall.
▪ Rather than interpreting her (id) aggression, the analyst described and
expressed interest in Angela’s (ego) need to protect herself.
▪ Assured that this crucial aspect of her psychic makeup was respected by
the analyst, very gradually, Angela allowed a dialogue to develop.
HEINZ HARTMANN:
THE TURN TOWARD ADAPTATION
▪ Heinz Hartmann (1894–1970), known as the father of ego psychology

▪ Hartmann - opening up a crucial investigation of the key processes and

vicissitudes of normal development

▪ The shaping influence of the environment on personality

▪ Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1939)

-highly abstract and largely nonclinical
 HEINZ HARTMANN:
THE TURN TOWARD ADAPTATION
▪ Hartmann put his emphasis on the notion that animals were designed, through
the process of survival of the fittest, to be highly adapted to their surroundings,
so that there would be a continual “reciprocal relationship between the organism
and its environment” (1939, p. 24).
▪ An average expectable environment is essential to the emergence of ego
capacities
▪ Rather than being forged in conflict and frustration, certain “conflict-free ego
capacities” were seen as intrinsic potentials, part of people’s birthright, functions
that would emerge naturally in a suitable environment, enabling them to fit into
their surround.
▪ These capacities included language, perception, object comprehension, and
thinking.
▪ These conflict-free functions could of course be invaded secondarily by conflict,
as witness hysterical paralyses, speech disorders, and the like.
DEVELOPMENTAL EGO PSYCHOLOGY:
RENÉ SPITZ
▪ René Spitz’s Hospitalism (1940)
▪ deepening the interest in issues of environment

▪ Whatever inborn psychological potential humans may have, its realization

is doomed in the absence of emotional connectedness with another
person.

▪ Spitz (1887–1974) studied children left, from birth, in a foundling home,

whose physical needs were adequately met but who were deprived of any
ongoing nurturing interaction.
DEVELOPMENTAL EGO PSYCHOLOGY:
RENÉ SPITZ

The Libidinal Object

➢Freud had introduced the term object (a person or an inanimate) to refer to

the target of instinctual impulses, through which the instinctual tension is
discharged
➢The mother as person has no singular importance to the child
➢The mother becomes important because she provides gratification
➢Human love is built on both direct and disguised (aim-inhibited)
gratifications, as the ego finds ways to repress, sublimate, and refine
instinctual impulses so they find a place in more complex object relations
 DEVELOPMENTAL EGO PSYCHOLOGY:
RENÉ SPITZ
The Libidinal Object
Identification, the process through which the child makes someone or an
aspect of someone a part of himself
▪ a psychical maneuver attempting to soften the frustrating experience of
loss
One may take on some qualities of a loved one following her death
▪ When gratification is interrupted, when the object is lost or becomes
unavailable because of conflict, the object is internalized to permit fantasy
gratification
 DEVELOPMENTAL EGO PSYCHOLOGY:
RENÉ SPITZ
The Libidinal Object
▪ Spitz added to the id’s libidinal purposes a set of capacities that originate and
develop in the ego, parallel to the libido’s pursuit of pleasure, that allows for the
unfolding of a sense of caring and a deeply gratifying personal connection.
▪ In Spitz’s system, having a libidinal object is not a given, something easily
obtained with even the most impersonal experience of gratification.
▪ Rather, having a libidinal object is a developmental achievement reflecting the
complex psychological capacity to establish a selective, very personal
attachment that is retained even in that person’s absence.
▪ Spitz’s libidinal object is not simply a means to an end, drive discharge, nor the
consequence of defensive internalization, but fundamentally important in its own
right
▪ The libidinal object provides the essential human connectedness within which all
psychological development occurs.
DEVELOPMENTAL EGO PSYCHOLOGY:
RENÉ SPITZ
Psychological Fusion

Spitz reoriented psychoanalytic focus on early life by describing the infant as

initially both
undifferentiated -a term reflecting the state of the infant’s individual psyche
nondifferentiated -a term recasting the basic image of crucial developmental
concern from that of the infant alone to a new image of “infant-with-mother”
 DEVELOPMENTAL EGO PSYCHOLOGY:
RENÉ SPITZ
▪ Spitz envisioned the infant as extending the physiologically parasitic relationship with
the mother in the womb into a state of psychological fusion with the mother after
birth
▪ The mother, with her more developed psychical capacities, is the environment for the
essentially helpless, vulnerable baby
▪ The mother process the experience, she functions as the baby’s “auxiliary ego,”
regulating the experience, soothing him, shielding him from disorganizing
overstimulation, until he develops the ego capacity to process and regulate experience
on his own.

▪ Physical contact, body tension, posture, motion, rhythm, and tone

DEVELOPMENTAL EGO PSYCHOLOGY:
RENÉ SPITZ
▪ Certain predictable shifts take place in the infant’s behavioral attitudes
toward others
▪ Indicators -external manifestations -- marking critical developmental turning
points, which he called “organizers of the psyche.”
1) The baby’s first social response, the smiling response which occurs
predictably at three months of age
2) “stranger anxiety” by eight months, the infant not only recognizes the
mother’s face, distinct from all others, but reacts with anxiety and retreats
from a stranger’s face. The stranger’s presence alerts him to his mother’s
absence
3) the mastery of the “no,” about fifteen months encouraged a consideration of
the developmental aspects of superego formation
DEVELOPMENTAL EGO PSYCHOLOGY:
MARGARET MAHLER
▪ Margaret Mahler (1897–1985), a child analyst and former pediatrician who
trained in Vienna before moving to New York

▪ Mahler, extending Spitz’s emphasis on the crucial role of early relationships,

initiated a more constructive exploration of severe disturbances of childhood.
▪ What appears to be psychotic self-absorption might more meaningfully be
described as a failure in the basic formation of the self, a profound confusion
about who one is: what is self and what is other.
Mahler draws a distinction between biological and psychological birth
the process of separation-individuation
The more decisive stages of separation-individuation take place in early
childhood, that conflict situation is revived throughout life
DEVELOPMENTAL EGO PSYCHOLOGY:
MARGARET MAHLER
▪ Normal Autism in which the newborn experiences only the internal arousal originated from
transient physical states or needs, like hunger, thirst, and urination. Newborn does not aware of
the source of the pleasure or pain and cannot differentiate between the self and object.

▪ Normal Symbiosis in which the infant is proposed to experience “…as though he and mother
were an omnipotent dual unit within one common boundary” (Mahler, Pine & Bergman, 2002,
p.291).
▪ The infant begins to acknowledge the need-satisfying object, the mother or basic caregiver.
▪ Experiences related to good and bad qualities of this need-satisfying object begin to accumulate
internally in this stage, about in the second month of life. These are the essence formation of the
internal mental representations.
This initial stage is characterized by the splitting of the good and bad mental representations of the
object and the self.
DEVELOPMENTAL EGO PSYCHOLOGY:
MARGARET MAHLER
▪ Separation Individuation - involves four distinct sub-phases
▪ “Differentiation and the Development of Body Image”: Infant’s inward directed attention is
increasingly shifted to outward directed attention and alertness. Newborn’s attention catches
the mother and her parts, such as hair, nose and necklace in this stage for the first time. The
differentiation between the sense of self and object begins to come into existence in mental
representations.
▪ “Practicing”, which begins properly when the infant achieves movement capacity around 12
months of age. There is increasing awareness of the outer world, which results in a desire for
exploring. If there is not a need for emotional refueling from the mother, the child wants to
practice newly met external world and increases the differentiation from mother.
DEVELOPMENTAL EGO PSYCHOLOGY:
MARGARET MAHLER
▪ “Rapprochement” which characterized by the increased ego capacity for the recognition of
being separate from the mother around the second year of life. As the separateness from the
mother evolves, the child experiences separation anxiety. There is a decrease in the feeling of
omnipotence and an increase in the sense of dependency.
*There is a tendency of separating and splitting the mental representation of good from bad
mother in order to keep away from the anxiety generated by this ambivalence

▪ “Emotional Object Constancy and Individuality”. The child establishes a stable and coherent
mental representation of the mother by integrating previously split representations of good and
bad qualities into one inner whole representation.
Through this integration, the child develops a differentiated and individuated self.

*Splitting is healed and good and bad mental representations of the self and the mother get
unified in this stage of development.
A REVISED THEORY OF INSTINCTUAL
DRIVE: EDITH JACOBSON
▪ Edith Jacobson (1897–1978), originally a member of the Berlin
Psychoanalytic Society, arrived in New York in 1938 shortly after her release
from a Nazi prison and her escape from Germany.

▪ The Self and the Object World (1964)

A REVISED THEORY OF INSTINCTUAL DRIVE:
EDITH JACOBSON
▪ Biology and experience mutually influence each other and are in ongoing interaction
throughout development

▪ Jacobson, in The Self and the Object World (1964) - effectively reworked the entirety
of Freud’s energy theory, his account of the psychosexual stages of development, and
his conceptualization of id, ego, and superego.
A REVISED THEORY OF INSTINCTUAL
DRIVE: EDITH JACOBSON
▪ In agreement with Hartmann, Jacobson proposed that instinctual drives are
not “givens” but rather are biologically predetermined, innate potentials.
▪ While responsive to internal maturational factors, their distinctive features
are acquired in the context of early relationships.

▪ There is no such thing as simply “good” mothering, in some objective sense,

only mothering that feels good to this particular baby.
▪ Issues of temperamental predisposition (e.g., an easily frustrated infant), fit
or misfit (e.g., a calm baby and an excitable mother), affective matching or
mismatching (e.g., a happy baby and a depressed mother), and the mother’s
capacity to sense and respond to her baby’s changing developmental needs—
these will all be crucial in determining what affect is elicited in the infant at
any given time
 CLINICAL APPLICATIONS OF DEVELOPMENTAL
EGO PSYCHOLOGY
▪ The ego psychologists pay increasing attention to disruptions in developmental processes

▪ The ego psychologists investigated preoedipal disturbances, those that often take place
prior to the emergence of language

▪ The preoedipal transference is more frequently characterized by a kaleidoscopic

presentation of images of self and other, dominated by intense emotional immediacy

▪ For ego psychologists, the experience between patient and analyst becomes an occasion to
understand the nature of the patient’s psychic disruption and her adaptive efforts to
compensate
▪ The analytic relationship also has powerful transformative potential, the transference
providing an opportunity for reworking early disruptions, for the patient to use the
analyst to try to fill unmet developmental needs, for the patient now as an adult to
verbalize and experience with the analyst early fears and terrors that had, in childhood,
seemed overwhelming.