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While the Ego Psychology is not taught in psychoanalytic institutes outside of Mexico, ego psychological concepts like clinical history, psychodynamic key, defense mechanisms, resistances, therapeutic alliance, analytic setting are in wide clinical use in Latin American psychoanalytic practice, without any attribution or credit to Ego Psychology.
III. HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF EGO PSYCHOLOGY
III. A. ROOTS IN SIGMUND FREUD Although forerunners of Ego Psychology are found in Freud’s earlier writings (1895, 1900, 1911, 1914, 1915a, 1915b, 1915c, 1917a, 1917b,1921), “The Ego and the Id” (1923) and “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926) were his most directly relevant contributions to Ego Psychology and were a natural development of his evolving work. Prior to 1923, the Topographic Theory had focused on the relationship of mental contents to conscious and unconscious systems with their specific characteristics of functioning. Gradually, Freud came to recognize the disparity between clinical work and theory: In clinical work, aspects of the ego could be unconscious (defensive functioning and guilt) and unconscious derivatives could be found in consciousness; however, the Topographic Theory located the content (and processes) in the same Unconscious (Ucs) system or Preconscious (Pcs and Conscious (Cs) system (Gill, 1963; Waelder, 1960). These clinical observations underscored the need for some theoretical re-alignments, which Freud elucidated when he introduced his Structural Theory where the mind was conceived of in terms of three agencies/structures the Id, Ego and Superego – differentiated not by access to consciousness but by stable sets of functions and motives. In the Structural Theory the ego was defined as a coherent organization of processes, such as control of discharge, censorship and defenses, thinking and reality testing, ranging from the permeable border of the Preconscious to the permeable border of the Unconscious. Interestingly, this was presaged in Freud’s (1915) paper on “The Unconscious” where Freud briefly conceived of complex preconscious thinking with infusions of unconscious elements, extending from a permeable border of the system Ucs to the permeable border of the system Cs. Central to the development of Ego Psychology was Freud’s move from his first theory of anxiety to his second theory of anxiety. Here, the active ego generates a signal of anxiety in response to the anticipated dangers posed by sexual or aggressive drives. Signal anxiety is a transformed rudimentary archaic traumatic anxiety, signaling dangers connected with the loss of the object, loss of the object’s love, castration, and the loss of internal acceptance/ ‘love by superego’. The signal anxiety triggers defenses, warding off impeding dangers: “Whereas the old view made it natural to suppose that anxiety arose from the libido belonging to the repressed instinctual impulses, the new one, on the contrary, made the ego the source of anxiety”(Freud, 1926, p. 161). The ego assumed its role as the executive agency of the mind, managing conflict
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