Psychoanalytic ego psychology: A European perspective

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• psychoanalytic ego psychology
• Heinz Hartmann
• history of psychoanalysis
• Otto Fenichel
• Thomä and Kächele

Notes

1 This is a not only largely extended, but also newly conceived version of the preliminary contribution written by the author for the item “Ego psychology” (https://online.flippingbook.com/view/544664/110) of the Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (IRED), the dictionary originally conceived by Stefano Bolognini and published by the International Psychoanalytic Association. “Ego psychology,” coauthored by Harold Blum, Marco Conci, Olga Santa Maria, and Eva Papiasvili, has been online since December 2020. This work of revision was made between summer 2021 and summer 2022, its first result being Conci (2021). Translations of texts with no English original have been made by the author. The author thanks Paolo Migone for his many instances of useful feedback, and the journal’s editorial board colleagues, particularly Grigoris Maniadakis and Carlo Bonomi, for their intellectual support and appreciation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marco Conci

Marco Conci, MD, is a medical doctor (Florence, 1981), psychiatrist (Rome, 1986), psychoanalyst, and member of the IFPS and the IPA. Since 1999 he has been working as a psychoanalyst in Munich, where he is a training and supervising analyst of the Munich Akademie für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie and a full member of the German Psychoanalytic Society. Since 2012 he has also been a full member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. The editor of the Italian edition (1991) of Sigmund Freud’s letters to Eduard Silberstein, he is also the author of Sullivan rivisitato (2000; translated into German, English, and Spanish), and in 2019 he published the book Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion and the multiple voices of international psychoanalysis. A member of the editorial board of this journal since 1994, he has been its Coeditor-in-Chief since June 2007 (until September 2014 with Christer Sjödin, and since then with Grigoris Maniadakis).