Talk:Ego-psychology

Ego-psychology (Fr. psychologie du moi) has been -- since its development in the 1930s -- the dominant school of psychoanalysis in the International Psycho-Analytical Association (IPA).

Sigmund Freud

Structural Model

It draws mainly on Freud's structural model of the psyche, which was first put forward in The Ego and the Id (1923).

This model comprises three agencies: the id, the ego, and the superego.

Since the ego plays a crucial role in mediating between the conflicting demands of the instinctual id, the moralistic superego and external reality, more attention began to be paid to its development and structure.

Anna Freud's book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) was one of the first works to focus almost entirely on the ego, and the trend became firmly established in Heinz Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1939), which is now regarded as the foundational text of ego-psychology.

Ego-psychology was taken to the United States by the Austrian analysts who emigrated there in the late 1930s, and since the early 1950s it has been the dominant school of psychoanalysis not only in the United States but also in the whole of the IPA.

This position of dominance has enabled ego-psychology to present itself as the inheritor of Freudian psychoanalysis in its purist form, when in fact there are radical differences between some of its tenets and Freud's work.

For much of his professional life, Lacan disputed ego-psychology's claim to be the true heir to the Freudian legacy, even though Lacan's analyst, Rudolph Loewenstein, was one of ego-psychology's founding fathers.

After Lacan was expelled from the IPA in 1953, he was free to voice his criticisms of ego- psychology openly, and during the rest of his life he developed a sustained and powerful critique.

Much of Lacanian theory cannot be properly understood without reference to the ideas of ego-psychology with which Lacan contrasts it.

Lacan challenged all the central concepts of ego-psychology, such as the concepts of adaptation and the autonomous ego.

His criticisms of ego-psychology are often intertwined with his criticisms of the IPA which was dominated by this particular school of thought.

Lacan presents both ego-psychology and the IPA as the 'antithesis' of true psychoanalysis.

Lacan argues that both were irremediably corrupted by the culture of the United States (see factor c).

Lacan's powerful critique has meant that few people now accept uncritically the claims of ego-psychology to identify itself as 'classical psychoanalysis'.