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.

KEYWORDS:

• Negative therapeutic reaction
• guilt
• superego
• object relations theory
• ego psychology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats 1816; https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44481/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-homer.

2 In this paper, except where there is a direct quote from a specific text (e.g. the Strachey translation of the Complete Works) the term “drive” will be used in preference to the term “instinct”. Readers interested in pursuing the difference and understanding the rationale of this choice are directed to Laplanche and Pontalis (1973), pp. 214–217.

3 Arlow and Brenner (1964) had argued that according to the assumptions of the Topographic Theory, “Because [unconscious fantasies] are not accessible to consciousness and have the power to produce derivatives, such fantasies should belong to the system Ucs. On the other hand, unconscious fantasies are composed of definite word and object representations which may be integrated according to the laws of the secondary process. According to these criteria, such fantasies should belong to the system Pcs” (52). See also Arlow (1969).

4 Of course, like formulations of the essential nature of light in contemporary physics as behaving both like a particle and a wave, so, too, we might wonder if Freud was assuming that in their initial state, the drives behave as if they were both ideational and purely energic.

5 This failure in adequate functional development, which can lead to difficulties in homeostatic and other elaborative/regulatory activity, may be connected to problematic early object relations.

6 For an extended discussion of this, see Levine 2022.