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account for unconscious aspects of clinical phenomena like resistance and anxiety, which were not sufficiently explicable by his Topographical Model of the mind, originally formulated in “The interpretation of dreams” (Freud 1900) . Additionally, defining Ego Psychology as a necessary phase in the development of psychoanalysis confirms the nature of the analytic discourse as ‘research work in progress’, and makes it possible to account for the variety of ways in which this new phase was dealt with by authors in Europe and North America. The early traces of the approach to Ego Psychology developed later by Heinz Hartmann and his collaborators are discernible in his early publication “Die Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse” [The Foundations of Psychoanalysis] (Hartmann 1927), which was never translated in its entirety into English. In the first chapter, Hartmann presented psychoanalysis as a ‘natural science’, and showed how important it was to redefine it in such a way as to make of psychoanalysis a discipline capable of collaborating with general psychology and social sciences. Such a priority and perspective became the predominant psychoanalytic paradigm between 1950 and 1970 in the United States. This was never the case in Europe, where the hegemonic agenda and the monolithic character of what was also called ‘American Ego Psychology’ eventually limited the reception of Ego Psychology. The one-sided way in which Ego Psychology was reimported from the United States to Europe almost exclusively in the unilateral form given it by Heinz Hartmann and his collaborators was addressed by Paul Parin in his 1990 article “Die Beschädigung der Psychoanalyse in der angelsächsischen Emigration und ihre Rückkehr nach Europa” (The Damage to Psychoanalysis in its Anglo-Saxon Emigration and its Return to Europe). In the contemporary Italian dictionary published by Einaudi (Barale, Bertani, Gallese, Mistura, Zamperini, eds., 2007), ‘Ego Psychology’ entry was totally identified with its above mentioned narrow North American definition and the item’s authors Fornaro, M. and Migone, P. (Fornaro and Mignone 2007) omitted mentioning any post-war European development in this field. Similarly, a German dictionary (Hartkamp 2008), defining the item “Ich- Psychologie” (Ego Psychology), mentioned only two German authors Peter Fürstenau and Annelise Heigl-Evers. It is a paradox that, while Heinz Hartmann cites Fenichel extensively as an important contributor to the theory and technique of Ego Psychology, Martin Bergmann, in his acclaimed publication “The Hartmann Era” (2000) almost exclusively identifies first generation Ego Psychology with the work of Heinz Hartmann and his closest collaborators, acknowledges Fenichel only marginally, and does not mention any significant contribution to Ego Psychology coming from Europe. Similarly, while Hartmann cites both Sandor Ferenczi and Paul Federn’s contribution in his numerous publications, David Rapaport’s (1958a) selective review “A Historical Review of Psychoanalytic Ego Psychology”, influential in Europe, does not. In Rapaport’s view, the first phase ended in 1897, with Freud’s renunciation of the seduction theory; the second phase ended in 1923, with the publication of Freud’s “The Ego and the Id”; the third phase was
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