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.

KEYWORDS:

• Ego
• adaptation
• affect
• signal anxiety
• object
• internal representation
• relational psychoanalysis
• neutralized energy

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Merton Shill

Before immigrating to the United States, Merton Shill, Ph.D., was an attorney and barrister of the Supreme Court of South Africa. He thereafter completed a Ph.D. in a Joint Program in Clinical and Personality Psychology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Shill was Senior Research Associate in the Child Analytic Study Program, Children’s Psychiatric Hospital, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, under the directorship of Humberto Nagera, M.D. He is a graduate in adult psychoanalysis of the Contemporary Freudian Society and partially completed training as a candidate in child psychoanalysis at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. He is currently in private practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry where he supervises psychiatric residents in psychodynamic psychiatry.