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(neurotic, ‘normal’) level of personality organization allows for intrapsychic inter-systemic conflicts between all three agencies of Id, Ego, and Super-Ego (drive-defense conflicts). Here, the predominant mode of defense is repression. In his latest level of theory integration, Kernberg (2004, 2015) proposed a general developmental frame that integrates the psychoanalytic/structural theory of development, rooted in Object Relations Theory, with neurobiological aspects of development. His general conclusion relates to parallel and mutually influential development of neurobiologial affective and cognitive systems, ultimately controlled by genetic determinants, and psychodynamic systems, corresponding to both reality and motivated distortions of the internal and external relations with significant others. (See also separate entries of OBJECT RELATIONS, CONFLICT and SELF.) Nancy Chodorow presents yet another integration which she calls the Intersubjective Ego Psychology, as reconciling two (usually thought of as) contradictory psychoanalytic approaches – American Ego Psychology and Interpersonal psychoanalysis, established by founding North American theorists Heinz Hartmann and Harry Stack Sullivan. She sees Loewald and Erikson, both self-identified as ego psychologists, as early proponents of this hybrid orientation. In Chodorow’s contemporary exposition, Intersubjective Ego Psychology presents “…a middle terrain between, on one hand, classical structural and contemporary ego psychology, and, on the other hand, classical interpersonal and contemporary relational psychoanalysis, much as the British Independent or Middle Group…originally located itself between Klein and Anna Freud” (Chodorow 2004, p.210). Clinically, the intersubjective ego psychology strives thus to integrate a ‘one-person’ intrapsychic perspective centered on unconscious fantasy, drive derivatives, resistances, defenses, unconscious conflicts and compromise formations, in consonance with a ‘two-person’ analytic process, the mother-child, and by extension socio-cultural field. It combines the language of interpretation and insight with the language of enactment, transference-countertransference, and the contribution of analyst’s subjectivity. The orientation includes various contributions of Boesky (1989), Chused 1997), Jacobs (1999), McLaughlin (1996), Poland (2000), and Renik (1996).
III. Bc. Branches and Conceptualizations III. Bca. Developmental Ego Psychology
Within structural theory, psycho-sexual development, development of personality organization, and object relations were not considered separate theories. The ‘nesting’ of object relations’ theory within the later structural theory of 1923 had been already presaged in Freud’s paper “On Narcissism” (1914), and especially in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917b) elucidating processes of introjection and internalization. In 1926, Sigmund Freud proposed that the ego evolved through identifications. Heinz Hartmann (1950) located differentiated self-representations and object representations within the system ego. In addition to Anna Freud ’s formulation of ‘developmental lines’, which link psycho-sexual development with specific anxieties, defenses and object relations, and Hartmann’s developmental propositions
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