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forged by the ego in response to the multiple conflicting demands of the id, superego, reality, and the compulsion to repeat. Edward Glover (1943), in England, introduced the concept of ‘ ego nuclei’ built from memory traces of experience into a coherent whole. Franz Alexander (1933), graduate of Berlin Institute, and a leading figure of so called ‘Chicago School ‘and psychosomatic medicine, wrote on, among many other subjects, multifaceted relationship and mutual influences between structural and instinctual conflicts. Otto Fenichel (1938, 1941c, 1945), transcending limits of Vienna, Prague, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, an internationally recognized encyclopedist of psychoanalytic theory and technique of his time, in an ongoing ‘controversial dialogue’ with Alexander, pointed out that “An instinctual conflict … is always a structural conflict as well; one of the conflicting instincts represents the ego … [or is] strengthened for purposes of ego defense” (Fenichel 1945, p. 130). It was Fenichel who elaborated on Anna Freud’s idea of how ego assists analytic work and, in this process, he coined the phrase ‘ observing ego ’. III. B. POST-FREUDIAN DEVELOPMENTS IN EGO PSYCHOLOGY/STRUCTURAL THEORY IN NORTH AMERICA In North America, Ego Psychology was potentiated by Anna Freud (1936/1946), who brought together and elaborated on key defensive functions of the ego, and enunciated the technical point that the analysts’ optimal stance would be equidistant from the derivatives of the three macro-structures, and by the ‘American ego psychologists’ Hartmann (1939/1958), Kris and Lowenstein (Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein 1964), and Rapaport (1959/1960) whose ambition it was to systematize the metatheory of psychoanalysis as a general psychology. Lasting contributions of theirs and the next generation were additionally made by Fenichel, Nunberg, Waelder, Jacobson, Mahler, Rangell, Loewald, Bergmann, Arlow, and many others. Some of the seminal contributions are outlined below. III. Ba. Heinz Hartmann, His Collaborators and Contemporaries “Just as Hartmann pointed out with regard to those who stressed ‘the unconscious before Freud’ (e.g., Whyte, 1960) that it was Freud who systematized it, so can we say it was Hartmann who, more than anyone else, systematized the existing fragments of ego psychology into a composite whole” (Rangell, 1965, p. 7). Beginning with the publication of his 1939 monograph, Heinz Hartmann embarked on a series of elaborations of psychoanalytic theory, primarily in the area of ego psychology. He expanded ego functioning beyond defense with an emphasis on adaptation together with the postulation of innate , pre-conflictual, relatively autonomous (and relatively conflict free ) and pre-formed psychic structures arising from biological roots and fitting together in an average expectable environment, further elaborated in conjunction with developmental
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