IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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pursue his clinical interest in the sickest patients, and to develop his own theoretical point of view, that is, his own Ego Psychology.

III. Cb. Three Authors Active Before and After World War II Not only Edoardo Weiss (1889-1970) and Anna Freud (1895-1982), but also Gustav Bally (1893-1966) were active in the field of Ego Psychology both before and after World War II. As far as Bally’s contribution to Ego Psychology is concerned, his 1932 article “Frühe Entwicklungsstadien des Ichs. Primäre Objektliebe” [Early stages of development of the ego. Primary object love] was mentioned twice by Heinz Hartmann in his monograph Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. In 1925 Weiss co-founded the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and founded the Italian Rivista Italiana di Psicoanalisi. In it, he published various ego psychological papers, as for example, “Il Super-io” [The superego] (1933), and “La parte inconscia dell’Io” [The unconscious part of the ego] (1934). His tolerance and pluralism are an important ingredient of the way in which psychoanalysis developed in Italy after World War II (see David 1990, and Conci 2019). Anna Freud’s 1936 book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, was the most important book on ego psychology after Freud’s Inhibition, symptom and anxiety (1926) , antedating Hartmann’s Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation by three years. Paul Gray (1982) stressed the resistances that Anna Freud’s book evoked among analysts, not excluding Freud, who referred to her work only once. Anna Freud did not fail to admit the importance of Hartmann’s perspective in her homage to Hartmann in the Festschrift in his honor: “The child analyst’s thinking, governed as it is by the developmental aspects of the human personality, does not thrive on the basis of drive psychology alone, but needs to range freely in the whole theoretical field of psychoanalysis, according equal significance to id, ego, and superego, to depth and surface, as Hartmann does. This creates the specific links between his work and the child analyst’s thinking” (A. Freud 1966, p. 17 and p. 21). The Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic, founded by Anna Freud in 1947, became a world-wide leading institution for the training of child psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. In the mid-1950s a major research project was undertaken under the leadership of Joseph Sandler, the Hampstead Index Project (see Bolland and Sandler, 1985). As a result, many papers were published by Sandler and his co-workers, most of them in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child and reprinted in Sandler (1987). Anna Freud’s 1965 book, Normality and Pathology in Childhood, was characterized as “one of the most important books of the Hartman era” (Bergmann 2000, p. 49).

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