Ego Psychology Research Articles

Was Anna Freud a “friend of Dorothy”? A queer phenomenological historiography of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's personal and professional relationship

AbstractThe nature of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's 5‐decade‐long personal and professional relationship has always been subject to speculation. This paper considers the historiography of this important and enigmatic relationship from 1920s Vienna to today. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, which theorises sexual orientation and whiteness in spatial terms, I illustrate how the relationship was seen as deviating from the ‘straight lines’ of mid‐20th century heteronormative society. I extend this queer phenomenological approach to think about cultural orientations to the relationship through an examination of its depiction in biographies published in the 1980s, the collections at the Freud Museums in London and Vienna, and a fictionalised account of Anna Freud's life published in 2014. Extending Ahmed's queer phenomenological vocabulary, I identify examples of ‘straightening up’, ‘straightening devices’ and ‘straightening up by queering’. The possibility of finding ‘queer angles’ in Anna Freud's early clinical writings, in contrast to the normative tendencies of her later writing on ego psychology, is explored as a counterbalance to discussions about non‐normative sexuality and gender in psychotherapy which typically position these as something new. The relevance for clinical practice today is considered through the lens of an ethical imperative to find space for queer angles in the history of psychoanalysis.

Reconstructing the Family Unit: A Study of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

The family unit is the smallest but most important unit of the society. When the families are strong and united, the entire nation will definitely be strong and prosperous. If the families are weak or fragile, the entire society will obviously be fragilised. We set out in this study to probe into the American family unit as depicted in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and F. Scot Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. This paper is premised on the hypothetical contention that the American family unit as depicted in the novels under study, has significantly disintegrated, and is in dire need of reconstruction. Individual and Ego Psychological theories constitute the theoretical framework for this paper. Looking through the theoretical lens of Adler’s Individual Psychology and Erikson’s Ego Psychology, one can posit that, both novelists suggest in their novels under study a moral and spiritual rearmament as a condition sine qua non for the reconstruction of the American family unit.

Personality Structure in Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Therapies

Psychodynamic psychotherapy or analytical therapies are therapies based on psychoanalysis. C. Jung's archetypes have an important role in the science of psychology. Unlike S. Freud, Jung notes that libido is not only a source of sexual energy, but reflects the whole reality of humanity. Psychodynamic psychotherapy or analytical therapies are therapies based on psychoanalysis. Freud "Ego psychology" explored early childhood relationships between mother and child, noting that the relationships we experience in early childhood with those who care for us are repeated in adulthood. J. Lacan's theory considers the ego as an illusion and accepts that we are a personality aimed at fulfilling the wishes and dreams of our parents. In general, psychodynamic psychotherapy includes long-term therapies based on early childhood, parent-child relationships, and dreams. The main purpose of the article is to examine psychoanalysis, personality structure in psychoanalysis, therapies derived from it, analytic or psychodynamic therapies.

Assessing the potential of ChatGPT for psychodynamic formulations in psychiatry: An exploratory study

Although there were several attempts to apply ChatGPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) to medicine, little is known about therapeutic applications in psychiatry. In this exploratory study, we aimed to evaluate the characteristics and appropriateness of the psychodynamic formulations created by ChatGPT. Along with a case selected from the psychoanalytic literature, input prompts were designed to include different levels of background knowledge. These included naïve prompts, keywords created by ChatGPT, keywords created by psychiatrists, and psychodynamic concepts from the literature. The psychodynamic formulations generated from the different prompts were evaluated by five psychiatrists from different institutions. We next conducted further tests in which instructions on the use of different psychodynamic models were added to the input prompts. The models used were ego psychology, self-psychology, and object relations. The results from naïve prompts and psychodynamic concepts were rated as appropriate by most raters. The psychodynamic concept prompt output was rated the highest. Interrater agreement was statistically significant. The results from the tests using instructions in different psychoanalytic theories were also rated as appropriate by most raters. They included key elements of the psychodynamic formulation and suggested interpretations similar to the literature. These findings suggest potential of ChatGPT for use in psychiatry.

Book Review: Toward a Unified Psychoanalytic Theory: Foundation in a Revised and Expanded Ego Psychology

Book Review: Toward a Unified Psychoanalytic Theory: Foundation in a Revised and Expanded Ego Psychology

On looking into The Ego and the Id 100 years after its publication

ABSTRACT Freud's publication of The Ego and the Id sparked a diverging set of psychoanalytic models - ego psychology, structural conflict theory, Kleinianism, object relations theories, Lacanianism, etc. - each of which attempted to deal with the clinical limitations of his first topography in regard to unconscious guilt, negative therapeutic reactions and primitive character organizations. This paper attempts to look back on these developments from the perspective of contemporary, post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories.

Etiology and Treatment of Major Depressive Disorder - From a Psychodynamic Theory Perspective

The purpose of this review article is to give an overview of how Psychodynamic Theory examines the etiology of Major Depressive Disorder and their corresponding therapeutic treatment. Method used in this article is literature review from Google Scholar and Elton B. Stephens Company (EBSCO) host database provided by The Ohio State University. Result explains the evolution of Psychodynamic Theory from Drive theory, to Ego Psychology, Object Relations, and Self Psychology. Moreover, the mechanisms and procedures of the therapies with good therapeutic effects are reviewed and analyzed. Specifically, psychodynamic therapy including Mindfulness-based Therapy, dream analysis, inkblot therapy, and Cognitive Behavior Therapy. As psychological therapy is test-effective, psychological approaches from interpretive pole to supportive pole with different modern therapy such as Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Mindfulness-based Therapy are being discussed. Risk factors that may lead to countertransference and discordant therapeutic relationships are presented. The present study provides suggestions for future research focusing on comorbidity of mental disorder. For treatment practice, this study emphasizes on culture difference and individual differences.

Dialectical Integration: The Case of Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Based on Hegel's dialectics, we argue that different psychotherapies considered monolithic such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and psychoanalysis, even though they hold radically different views on human suffering and therapy's aims, profoundly influence each other. We call this mutual influence dialectical integration (DI). DI is the result of unconscious processes that are activated by antagonism and negation for self‐constitution. In a dialectically formative process, the self‐constitution of CBT and psychoanalysis each is achieved by means of the negation of part of itself, which undergoes alienation in the other, thereby superficially taking the form of a rejection of the other approach. But whenever theoretical or practical lacunae occur in the unfolding of these disciplines, they negate this primary negation and re‐internalize the alienated self‐component. This part does not return in its original—and negated—form, but, through a sublation introducing theoretical and practical development. This is illustrated here by Hartmann's ego psychology, Beck's cognitive theory, Young's schema therapy, and Bateman & Fonagy's mentalization‐based therapy (MBT). We show how these developments incorporate elements of otherness, which are not simply extraneous to the tradition but also part of it. We conclude by showing how DI gives rise to recognition and containment of otherness in both schools.

HUNDRED YEARS OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC PROGRESSIVE MENTAL HEALTH MOVEMENT.

Beginning in 1920 and in keeping with Freud's sustained encouragement, the first two generations of European psychoanalysts initiated a progressive mental health movement by offering very low cost and free psychoanalytic services that were in harmony with Austrian social democratic and socialist political leaders' commitment to societal reforms in light of the economic and social inequities after the First World War. This synthesis of biographical and autobiographical accounts of early Freudian, Ego Psychology and Neo-Freudian theorists' contributions highlights their consideration of the effects of social injustice as central challenges to the development of psychological growth.

Dismantling the Face

This article addresses the chapter in A Thousand Plateaus, “Year Zero: Faciality,” by examining Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal to “dismantle” the abstract machine that is responsible for producing the subject’s collective or group face. After examining the components of the abstract machine, including its relationship to visual perception and emotion from the perspective of American Ego Psychology, a comparison is drawn between faciality and Walter Benjamin’s earlier thesis of the reproducibility of certain kinds of images in a technological or modern media society. The article concludes by outlining the three-step program of “schizoanalysis” that Deleuze and Guattari proposed as the political objective of “dismantling the face.”

Psychoanalytic ego psychology: A European perspective

The best way to reconstruct the history of psychoanalytic ideas is to begin from the study not of theories, but of the various authors and their contexts. Important contributions to the study of the ego in Europe had already come from Ferenczi and Fenichel, well before Hartmann founded Ego Psychology (EP), which became mainstream in North America. In Europe, before World War II, significant contributions to what here is called “psychoanalytic ego psychology” (Pep) (contrasted with Hartmann’s EP) came from Anna Freud, Paul Federn, and Gustav Bally. After World War II, contributions came from Alexander Mitscherlich, Paul Parin, and Johannes Cremerius in the German-speaking community, and from Joseph Sandler in the UK. If this is the case, we should then talk of “ego psychologies” in the same way as we talk of the various object relations theories. Pep – as it was described in the guiding principles formulated by Fenichel in the 1930s – keeps informing the clinical work of many psychoanalysts, even if they are not fully aware of it. For example, it represents the basic ingredient of the empirically verifiable “psychoanalytic therapy” formulated in detail by Helmut Thomä and Horst Kächele.

No Touching: Boundary Violation and Analytic Solidarity

“No Touching” argues that we can locate analytic solidarity in the boundaries drawn to protect analytic work from sexual enactment. The author traces ongoing elaborations of the notions of boundary and boundary violation as they become codified across the twentieth century in American (ego psychology) psychoanalysis and its legal and training institutions, in parallel with the retheorization of transference love toward a stable notion of erotic transference. The author argues that professional psychoanalytic institutions and associations only began to legislate boundary violation as a normative ethics problem when the feminization of psychoanalysis took place in the 1970s through the 1990s. The author then turns to the “overbounding” of analysis in its teletherapeutic contexts to ask if psychoanalytic suspicions of mediation are in part based in their capacity to suspend traditional forms of boundary violation.

Psychoanalysis, the Sufi, and the Story

Psychoanalysis, the Sufi, and the Story

Reading Hartmann’s Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation: Difficulties and Surprises

ABSTRACT Despite the richness of his ideas and their influence on subsequent schools of psychoanalysis, Hartmann’s message is obscured by difficult language. These difficulties include his use of metapsychological terms that “give the appearance of common understanding when such understanding does not exist,” as Winnicott put it, his use of assertion and certainty, as if the hypotheses he asks us to consider were already decided by fiat, and his habit of repeatedly interrupting his argument to tell us what he is not going to tell us, thus appearing to offer something and withhold it at the same time. Nonetheless, his practice of qualifying and requalifying his ideas, along with his love of paradox, ultimately conveys so complex an understanding of mental process – so far removed from the simple stereotype of a “conflict-free” sphere – that much of his monograph reads as a celebration of the role of irrationality, of fantasy, and of the imagination in adaptation.

Adaptation, Affect, and the Ego – Some Thoughts on Hartmann

ABSTRACT This discussion re-visits Hartmann’s classic treatise, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, to consider its implications for the role of ego functions and affect, signal anxiety, affect tolerance and the pleasure principle in effecting adaptation. These include relationships with objects, their affective internalization, representation and the role that these internalized objects play in the process of adaptation regulated by the ego in regard to relationships as part of external reality. Hartmann did not address these issues either at all or only by way of a nodding acknowledgment. His later work is similarly silent. This is, therefore, a road largely unexplored in the evolution of ego psychology, conflict theory and relational psychoanalysis, and their interconnections.

The Adaptation Function of Dreams and the Waking Work: A Modern Ego Psychology View

ABSTRACT This article is about the adaptive function of dreams. It applies Hartmann’s descriptions of autonomous ego functions, especially the synthetic function of the ego, to the dream’s use of reality and to the use of dreams for adaptation; to reality and to neurotic conflict. This paper poses a specific synthetic function of the ego to be called the waking work in which the dream is applied upon awakening to problems of adaptation, growth and development.

Review of Toward a unified psychoanalytic theory: Foundation in a revised and expanded ego psychology.

Review of Toward a unified psychoanalytic theory: Foundation in a revised and expanded ego psychology.

The origins of David Rapaport's 'Portrait of Moses' story

David Rapaport, one of the founders of psychoanalytic ego psychology, used a story about a portrait of Moses in three of his papers in the 1950s in order to illustrate his view that the self has the power to shape its own nature. The present article traces the origins and evolution of that story through Latin, Islamic and Jewish versions.

Psychoanalysis and anti-racism in mid-20th-century America: An alternative angle of vision

The conventional historiography of psychoanalysis in America offers few opportunities for the elaboration of anti-racist themes, and instead American ‘ego psychology’ has often been regarded as the most acute exemplar of ‘racist’ psychoanalysis. In this article, consistent with the historiographical turn Burnham first identified under the heading of ‘the New Freud Studies’, I distinguish between histories of psychoanalytic practitioners and histories of psychoanalytic ideas in order to open out an alternative angle of vision on the historiography. For psychoanalytic ideas were in fact omnipresent within American culture at mid-century, and they played a fundamental role in the psychological reworking of race that unfolded in the work of social scientists, literary artists, and cultural critics in the 1940s and early Cold War years, culminating in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, a major landmark in the civil rights narrative. By pursuing the implications of psychoanalysis in anti-racist struggles at mid-century, and with particular attention to Richard Wright and his autobiographical novel Black Boy, I move towards unearthing an alternative historical account of the intersection between psychoanalysis and race, which offers new ways for psychoanalysis and the history of the human sciences to think about this period.

Winnicott in Topeka: Ego Psychology, American Culture, and Object Relations.

Winnicott in Topeka: Ego Psychology, American Culture, and Object Relations.