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learning theory, child psychology, social psychology) in an attempt to found a true general psychology of the ego”, leading to notions of “de-sexualized neutralized energy”, ego’s “synthetic function” and a “conflict-free portion of the ego”, with ego as an “apparatus of regulation and adaptation to reality”, Laplanche and Pontalis at the same time acknowledge that it is “remarkably difficult to integrate all the psycho-analytic contributions to the concept of the ego into a unified line of thought’, to “counter these tendencies of ego psychology” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967/1973, p. 139). A corresponding lack of reception of ‘Classical’ North American Ego Psychology in the Francophone analytic world worldwide can be gathered from Hélène Tessier’s book (2005) “La psychanalyse américaine”. Judging Ego Psychology not in terms of its agenda (to develop psychoanalysis as a natural science), but in terms of its results (such as the autonomous pre- conflictual ego functioning and the conflict-free sphere), the author concludes that “such a perspective is considerably distant from the perspective of Freud” (Tessier 2005, p. 39). However, one of the self-defined ego psychologists Hans Loewald, has been recently added by the French Canadian analysts to the ‘Third Topography’ (Brusset 2006), a group of mostly French Post-Freudian thinkers who converge on the notion that in development, two- person psychology precedes one-person psychology of the internally structured and conflicted subject of Freud’s Topographic and Structural Theories (See the separate entries of THE UNCONSCIOUS, OBJECT RELATIONS THEORIES, and INTERSUBJECTIVITY). In his Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, Hinshelwood (1989) describes ‘Ego- Psychology’ as ‘the dominant school of psychoanalysis’ during 1940’s-1960’s, a special study of the ego and a continuation of the Classical psychoanalysis (by default), as it developed until the time of Freud’s death in 1939, a trend that was spearheaded by Anna Freud’s ( 1936/1946) book ”The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense” and became established as a school of psychoanalytic thought and practice with Hartmann’s addition of an explicit adaptational point of view in his ”Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation” (Hartmann, 1939/1958). Noting its supposed radical departures from the Freudian tradition of emphasis on drive reduction, ego-psychology is presented here as concerning itself with: a). the normative process in which a socially conforming individual is benignly assisted by his society; b). the origins of the ego from a symbiotic primary narcissism; c). the ego’s particular functions, including those involved in the conflict-free areas of the ego (motility, perception, memory, etc.); d). the ego’s mechanisms of adaptation as well as defense; e). the development of a precise technique of interpreting the preconscious (as opposed to the unconscious); and, f). a loyalty to the spirit of Freud’s early search for a scientific (deterministic) psychology. Sullivan’s Interpersonal/cultural Psychiatry, behaviorist tradition, strong tradition of learning theories and developmental psychology is viewed here as strengthening the adaptational aspect and the mechanistic presentation of Ego Psychology, fostering the view of ego and its development that lie outside of the classical psychoanalytic theory of drive reduction, and outside of such mechanisms of defense as projection and introjective identification. In North America , the internal critique of the ‘Hartmann era’ Ego Psychology (Blum 1998; Busch 2000; Blum 2010, 2015; Balsam 2012) included criticism of ‘phallocentric’ sex
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