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found: “In analytic therapy our main allies are the striving of unconscious forces for expression and the integrating tendency of the conscious ego . ... Nunberg’s thesis that the psychoanalytic treatment is not only an analytic but simultaneously a synthetic process as well is fully valid. [...] Through our interpretations, without fully realizing it, we actually do help the synthesis in the ego” (Alexander 1935, pp. 610-611; original emphasis). Otto Fenichel , influential in Europe as much if not more than in North America, welcomed Ego Psychology as a perspective through which it would eventually be possible not only to better account for the clinical phenomenon of unconscious resistance, but also to enable more exact formulation of basic principles of analytic technique. The fact that “ego psychology antedated the Hartmann era by a number of decades” and that “the leading ego psychologist was Otto Fenichel ” (Bergmann 2000, pp. 4 and 67), are substantiated by a large number of ego psychological papers by Fenichel, starting with his 1926 paper on “Identification.” Throughout 1935 – 1941, Fenichel wrote series of influential ego psychological papers on psychoanalytic technique (1935/1953; 1941/1954); early stages of ego development (1937/1954), ego strength, ego weakness and various ego disturbances (1938/1954), defense mechanisms (1940/1954), character (1941a/1954) and affects (1941b/1954), always with the regard to the pertaining technical implications. . In his paper, “Concerning the theory of psychoanalytic technique,” Fenichel writes: “Nowadays the psychology of the ego stands in the center of our investigations” (Fenichel, 1935/1953 p. 348). In the paper “Structural aspects of interpretation,” he shows how “the analyst works exclusively upon the ego ” (Fenichel 1941c/1954 , p. 54; original emphasis) and arrives at the final formulation: “That the analyst should carry on his work of interpretation from a position equidistant form ego, id, and superego, is a rule suggested by Anna Freud (1936) which can be paraphrased as meaning that the analyst must see all three aspects of psychic phenomena and in the struggle between them remain neutral. Essentially, however, he begins always to work with the ego and only through the ego can he reach the id and the superego; in this sense he is always closer to the ego than to the other two” (Fenichel 1941c/1954, p. 70). Equally relevant for contemporary clinical work is the ego psychological approach of a phenomenological nature developed by Paul Federn . Federn conceptualized psychosis, especially schizophrenia, not in terms of psychic conflict but in terms of a psychological deficiency connected with the family environment of the patient. Psychoanalytically speaking, a psychosis is for Federn a “sickness of the ego,” characterized by “insufficient cathexis of the ego” and accompanied by a “pathological or insufficient ego feeling” (Federn 1952). In 1952, Edoardo Weiss assembled Federn’s papers, connecting his clinical work with psychotic patients with his study of their ego, in the anthology “Ego Psychology and the Psychoses” (Federn 1952). Historically and conceptually, notable is Federn’s conflict between his need to stay close to Freud (of whom he, together with Anna Freud, became the official representative in Vienna after 1923) and his theoretical and clinical orientation revealing the need to freely
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