Ego Psychology

“Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered.”

— Daniel Webster

EGO AND DEFENSE MECHANISMS

It is Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna Freud (1895-1982) who is often identified as the first voice of ego psychology. Encouraged by her father to extend the study and practice of psychoanalysis to children, she is best known for elucidating the defense mechanisms by which the ego masters the environment and the shaping forces of each individual’s psychopathology, the id and the superego. The names and definitions she assigned are still the benchmark terminology of psychoanalytic psychology: repression, suppression, denial, reaction formation, undoing, rationalization, intellectualization, sublimation, displacement, and several others. These mechanisms are defined and illustrated in Table 3-1.

Sigmund Freud maintained that repression was the predominant defense mechanism, that it was the chief tool available to the ego to defend itself against the environment and the impulses of the id. The major thrust of analysis, therefore, was to uncover and comprehend the content of the repressed material. Anna Freud‘s articulation of the richness of the defense mechanisms pointed analysts toward the examination of the dynamic processes operative within the ego itself. However, she maintained that analysis of the ego paled by comparison with analysis of the id.

ADAPTATION AND DIFFERENTIATION

The promulgation of ego psychological theory fell to a generation of analysts who were mostly refugees from Hitler’s advance through Europe, and who had to postpone their major work until they could resettle in the 1930s. These included Ernst Kris, Rudolph Lowenstein, Rene Spitz, and chief among Freud’s protégés, Heinz Hartmann (1894-1970). A trainee of Freud’s, Hartmann undertook the expansion of his mentor’s model to explain some of its lingering questions: What was the origin of ego? How did ego tame id, which was powered by the potent energy of the drives? What was the purpose of the aggressive drive? What role did these structures and forces play in normal development?

For Hartmann, the unifying process of human psychological development was adaptation, a reciprocal relationship between the individual and his or her environment. The outcome of successful adaptation is a “fitting together” of the individual with the environment. Thus, conflict is neither the cause nor the outcome of psychopathology, but a normal and necessary part of the human condition. In Hartmann’s model, the ingredients of ego and id are present at birth in an undifferentiated matrix. Normative conflicts with the environment separate ego from id. Particularly, the infant expectably experiences certain degrees of frustration, as his or her too-human mother fails to provide total and immediate satisfaction. In fact, if there remained total gratification, there would never be any need to differentiate self from other, to pursue autonomy; in short, no need for an ego.

TABLE 3-1 Ego Defense Mechanisms Elaborated by Anna Freud

*Mechanism*	*Definition*	*Example*
Repression	Involuntary exclusion from conscious awareness of conflictual or painful impulses, thoughts, or memories	Battered child has no memories from before age 7.
Suppression	Conscious exclusion from awareness of painful impulses, thoughts, or memories	“I choose not to think about that.”
Denial	Failure to recognize external reality	Patient with malignant tumor insists she does not have cancer.
Reaction formation	Reversal of an impulse to its opposite	Jealous older sister becomes very affectionate and protective of newborn brother.
Undoing	Symbolic or actual negation of previous unacceptable thought or action	Woman has fleeting thought of killing her husband; unaware of it, she brings him a gift that night.
Rationalization	Elaboration of socially acceptable reasons to justify feelings or actions that are unconsciously determined	Embarrassed by his rival’s intellectual superiority, boy criticizes the other’s nerdy dress.
Intellectualization	Overuse of reasoning or logic to avoid awareness of feelings and impulses	Adolescent talks at great length about social issues to avoid confronting his own aggressive impulses.
Sublimation	Partial gratification of an impulse by altering the aim or object to make it socially more acceptable	Man channels aggressive urges into athletic competition.
Symbolization	Representation of affect-laden person, thing, or thought in the form of another person, thing, or thought that has some similarity of association	Sometimes a cigar isn’t just a cigar ….
Somatization	Expression of psychic conflict by production of physical symptom, sometimes symbolic of the conflict	Afraid of being bullied at school, child develops a stomachache.
Displacement	Affect originally attached to one object is transferred to a more innocuous object	Man is embarrassed and angry for being criticized by boss at work; ashamed of his powerlessness to object in public he comes home and kicks the dog.
Aim inhibition	Accepting partial gratification of an impulse	Man cultivates close friendship with woman who is sexually desired but socially forbidden to him.
Introjection (or internalization)	Assimilation of characteristics of an object into one’s own ego/superego	Man envies his boss, so he adopts his politics and tastes.
Identification	Modeling of one’s self on another person or group, but with less intensity and completeness than with introjection	Conscious emulation of an admired public figure.
Identification with the aggressor	Incorporation of aspects of another person who is perceived as a serious threat or cause of frustration	Boy in Oedipal stage assumes characteristics of father.
Idealization	Overestimation of positive and underestimation of negative qualities of a desired object	Widower is unable to recall any of the things he ever resented about his wife.
Projection	Attributing one’s own unacknowledged feelings and impulses to another person	Woman represses her own sexual hunger and dismisses all men as sex fiends.
Regression	Return to previous level of function or psychosexual stage	Five-year-old boy resumes bedwetting when sibling is born.
Splitting	Perceiving of objects as all good or all bad	Man can have sex with prostitutes but must treat wife as a chaste saint.
Dissociation	Splitting off of a group of thoughts or actions from conscious awareness	Fugue state.
Isolation (of affect)	Repression of affect away from a thought, or a thought away from its affect	Medical student dissects cadaver without any feelings about death.
Fantasy	Mental elaborations that provide partial gratification of impulses	Man with erectile dysfunction daydreams about orgies.
Turning (aggression) against the self	Self-destructive thoughts or actions replace aggression toward other objects	Woman blocks anxiety over fight with husband by getting into minor auto accident.
Turning passive into active	Action in anticipation of being acted upon	Patient misses therapy session just before therapist’s announced vacation.

Id, ego, and superego continue to separate by the process of differentiation. Within the ego, primitive regulatory factors are increasingly replaced or supplemented by more effective ones. The experiences of frustration, in the context of normative growth of brain and body, allow the developing ego to remember experiences long enough to delay gratification and anticipate the future. Part of the power the ego derives from the gradually differentiating matrix serves to gratify id desires, though not in the immediate and unrestrained terms of the primitive mind. In a reciprocal fashion, the memory of past gratification allows the ego to engage in delayed gratification. This process mandates the creation of an internal world of object representations; and this inner world facilitates further exercise of delayed gratification. As the structures ego and superego mature, the need for external fulfillment diminishes and autonomy increases.

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