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• Judgment about danger (Hoch & Polatin, 1949) & anticipation of consequences; • Concentration & attention (Freud, 1900); • Orientation (in space, place, time, overall context) (Kernberg 1915); • Self-care (A. Freud, 1965); • Social-interpersonal functioning (Slavson, 1969), autoplastic adaptation & alloplastic adaptation (Ferenczi 1934, Hartmann 1939/1958); • Movement from play to work (A. Freud, 1965; Blackman, 2016); • Abstraction ability (Blos, 1979); • Observing ego; self-observation Freud 1920, 1923; Fenichel 1938b; J.Sandler and A. Freud 1981) or mentalization (Kohut, 1959; Fonagy et al., 2002); • Ego interests (hobbies and career choices/Hartmann 1939/1958); • Self-preservation (Freud 1911) and vital instincts (Lowenstein 1940); • Executive functions (decision-making about oral, sexual and violent wishes; decision-making choice function within the intrapsychic process/Ragnell 1969a,b; ego integrative functioning/Rose 1991); With growing knowledge of the complexities of the unconscious ego functioning, various authors proposed additions to, or expansions of, the existing conceptualizations of the ever-enlarging list: As an example, Leo Rangell (1969a; 1969b) identified an unconscious decision-making function within the ego’s expanded unconscious executive functioning . In another example, Gilbert Rose (1964, 1987, 1991) further specified ego integrative function in relation to the fluctuations of the ‘ego boundaries’ and to the sense of identity , helpful in clarifying the difference between the relatively healthy creative person and one with an underlying psychotic or borderline character structure. He writes: “One cannot recommend a ‘creative surrender’ to imagination unless the ego’s integrative function, sense of identity, and reality testing are essentially intact” (Rose 1991, p. 131). Dan H. Buie (1981) additionally includes capacity for empathy. Leopold Bellak (1961) , studied the structural aspects of the process of free associations, previously characterized by a certain type of ego function, called by Hartmann the self-exclusion of the ego , closely related to Kris’s ‘regression in the service of the ego’ (1939) . He has identified this particular ego function as the ‘oscillating function of the ego ’. Like in the creative act, so in free associations, there is “a swing from regression to vigilance of cognitive, adaptive and synthetic functions. This produces emergent qualities which we know as the creative process” (ibid, p.13). Bellak concludes that the process of associating is predicated upon the ego’s oscillating function—the ability to oscillate from regression in the service of the ego (as described by Kris) to a heightened acuity of self- observation, and of synthetic functioning.
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