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systematic attention he has given to the ego psychologically founded interaction between the ego and the self. Furthermore, the diverse contemporary scene is enriched by resurgence of Contemporary Ego Psychology in Madrid by Cécilo Paniagua who developed further Paul Grey’s ‘microstructural analysis’ of psychic surface, in ways in which it demonstrates an effective capturing of id-ego interactions, evolving in the psychoanalytic process. Some of the aforementioned contributions are specified below. III. Ca. Ego Psychology in Europe before World War II Of interest here is Carlo Bonomi’s 2010 revisiting the topic “Ferenczi and Ego Psychology.” Only one year after his first meeting with Freud, Sandor Ferenczi coined the term “introjection” (see Ferenczi, 1909), which he thought of “as extension of the ego” (Ferenczi 1912, p. 317). In 1913 he published two additional contributions to the psychoanalytic study of the ego: “Stages in the development of the sense of reality,” and “Belief, disbelief, and conviction.” In the second paper, Ferenczi defined the sense of reality as not attainable by relying on authority, anticipating an important aspect of his later opposition to Ego Psychology based on the Structural Model. In fact, according to this, and at variance with Ferenczi’s usual point of view, the patient’s sense of reality is considered enhanced by the introjection of the analyst as an auxiliary superego. According to Bonomi, it was essentially due to the technical problems encountered by the analyst in the clinical work with patients that the mutual estrangement gradually developed between Ferenczi’s line of thought and the ego psychological concepts connected with the Structural Model emerged most clearly. While the development of the so-called ‘standard technique’ increasingly stressed the analyst’s abstinence from any form of participation in the relationship with the patient, Ferenczi gradually elaborated on an attitude of thoughtful participation in the psychoanalytic encounter. By 1927 Ferenczi stopped adhering to a preconceived model of therapy, embracing instead the idea of a basic “elasticity” of technique (Ferenczi, 1928). Having systematically worked with a wide range of traumatized and dissociated patients, Ferenczi had come to view the main problem of the ego not in its autonomy from instinctual pressures, as framed within Ego Psychology, but as the preservation of its boundaries and the feeling of oneself. Two papers by Franz Alexander are instructive in terms of the reception of Freud’s Structural Model and the elaboration of its technical consequences: his 1925 paper, written while still in Berlin, “A metapsychological description of the process of cure,” and the 1935 paper, already in Chicago, “The problem of psychoanalytic technique.” In the former paper, described as “one of the earliest responses of psychoanalytic technique to the structural theory” (Bergmann and Hartmann 1976 , p. 99), Alexander was the first analyst to advance the idea that “psychoanalytic technique should center its energy on the amelioration of the superego” (Bergmann, Hartmann, 1976, p. 99). In the second paper, a quite different point of view can be
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