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translates Ich mostly as ‘le moi’ (tonic form of ‘I’), that is subjective, more a self than the defensive reality-oriented ego of Ego psychology, with the consequence of having less room (and need) for elaborating on defenses, the only exception being Lacan’s (1966) psychotic defense of foreclosure. Theoretically, ‘le moi’ is defined as much by its identificatory ‘alienation’ in the desire of the Other as by its capacity for adaptation. For French analysts everything that is ego is listened to as emerging from the unconscious. There is an absence of the idea of a conflict free sphere. Clinically, Ego Psychology’s proposition of maintaining an analytical stance equidistant among all three psychic agencies and the external world (A. Freud 1936/1946) was taken to mean ‘maintaining a constant distance from the patient’ (Tessier 2004, 2005), which would be incompatible with French authors’ (Bouvet, Green, McDougall, and Roussillon) proposal of a flexible approach to patients, paying attention to their reaction to distance (see also separate entries THE UNCONSCIOUS, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, SELF). Overall, neither ‘ego’ nor ‘le moi’ are equivalent to German ‘Ich’. While in English- speaking psychoanalysis, there is an increased need for development of the concept of ‘self’, to account for the subjectivity lacking in the ‘ego’, in French psychoanalysis there is a diminished need for comparable development of the self, as ‘le moi’ is already ‘self-saturated’. Interestingly, similarly as with French ‘le moi’, there is the tight relationship between Spanish Yo or Portuguese Eu with subjectivity, leading to lesser need of usage of the term Self in the studies related to one’s own subjectivity in the Latin American region, the conclusion is different: there is a theoretical appreciation for the differentiation of ego as an abstract mental structure with functions from self as a total person (Resnik 1971-1972), and incorporating Hartmann-Jacobson’s thinking into synthetic models of mind, where ego is a psychic structure which contains self-representations (Grinberg 1966, pp. 242-243). Critique based on Narrow Definition of Ego Psychology During the so called ‘Hartman era’ (WWII – 1970), particularly in the English-speaking North America, Hartmann, Kris and Lowenstein’s ideas (and those of Anna Freud) dominated ‘Freudian’ psychoanalytic discourse, creating an impression of a hegemony. “What was not appreciated at the time was that those were also individual authors…In the Anna Freud’s group in England there was far more emphasis on the issues of defense and interest in development than abstract discourse concerning ego functions, energy transformations and general psychology of adaptation…” (Blum 1998, p.32). In the French tradition, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, who define Freudian ‘Ich’/ego as: (1) nucleus of consciousness and bundle of active mental functions; (2) organizer of the defenses; and (3) agency, mediating between external reality, id and super- ego, acknowledge the “school of ego psychology” of Hartmann, Kris, Lowenstein and Rapaport as one of diverse approaches, attempting to represent a “most consistent expression of the Freud’s structural theory”. Highly critical of Ego Psychology as a “school that has set out to relate the acquisitions of psychoanalysis to those of other disciplines (psychophysiology,
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