Back to Table of Contents
instincts; elaboration of aggression as a distinct drive operating according to the pleasure principle; extension of Freud’s theorizing on neutralization and sublimation. Ego psychology was developed out of Freud’s structural theory, especially by a group of European psychoanalysts who migrated to the United States prior to the Second World War. Most influential among these were Heinz Hartmann and his collaborators, Ernst Kris and Rudolph Loewenstein . Anna Freud worked with largely similar concepts, although there were some differences in emphasis. Along with their studies of the ego, Hartmann and his collaborators developed a set of ideas about the drives and their transformations that were quite influential in North America. Hartmann took a biological and evolutionary approach to understanding the nature of the drives. He (1948) noted that in biology, animal instinct at first was seen as a rigid fixed inherited action pattern, but then it was realized there was a gradation in different animals from these sorts of instincts to the drives of humans. He remarked that in the instinct of simpler animals the propelling force and the adaptation to reality, in terms of behaviors to be performed, were tightly coupled, largely fixed, and both were referred to as the “instinct”. He argued that what replaces the primitive instinct in more complex animals and in humans is not just the drive, but the drive + aspects of the ego. He asserted that Freud developed his theory of the malleable, displaceable drives to explain psychoanalytic findings without building on 19 th century scientific ideas. Thus, for Hartmann the drives of humans (and other more complex animals) embody one side of the idea of instinct, while the other side, the reality adaptation, is given over to the ego. This leads to a number of important further consequences, which formed the basis for the work of Hartmann and his collaborators. First, the development of the ego allows an enormous expansion of flexible adaptation to changing circumstances, both external and internal, as compared to the fixed action patterns of instincts. Hartmann (1939) referred to the ego as man’s organ of adaptation. Second, because of this arrangement, the drives are more estranged from reality. This can lead to problems such as neurosis, but also opens up possibilities such as sublimations, as the drives become more malleable (Hartmann, 1952). But for these possibilities to be realized, the drives and the ego have to work collaboratively. Hartmann’s life work was building a theory that explained the nature of this collaboration: on the ego side by looking at what the ego brought to the table (Hartmann, 1950) in terms of primary autonomous functions such as memory, control of motility, and the integrative function; on the side of the drives by working out the nature of the drives and distinguishing them from instinctive behaviors; and in terms of the interactions between the two, to look beyond mutual antagonism embodied in ego defenses against the drives, to the idea of the ego function of drive neutralization making drive energy more available to, and useable by, the ego (Hartmann, 1952). In terms of the nature of drives , Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein (1949) worked out a dual drive theory (libido and aggression). They followed Freud’s theory of sexuality and libido theory, but it was in relation to aggression that they made more original contributions. They asserted that Freud actually had 2 theories of aggression in his later work, but that they are
153
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online