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By integrating findings from other schools of thought, Ego Psychology has embraced the notion that a multitude of developmental and clinical phenomena occur simultaneously. Current-day clinical and theoretical Ego Psychology offers understandings that interpretation operates on the edge of patient’s readiness for insight, is not sterile, but affectively nuanced, and that the analytic process, itself, involves compromise formations in the analyst and analysand. Transference and countertransference are recognized as complex, overdetermined experiences. Such a multifaceted understanding of layered intrapsychic and inter-psychic transferential processes of both participants, working from ‘within the transference’, can enhance mentalization involved in ‘creating a psychoanalytic mind’, a prerequisite of success of interpretive technique. Ego functions contribute to perceptions of the body ego, its dynamic meaning and its mental representations. Responses to trauma can be understood in terms of unconscious ego mechanisms dominating ‘zero process’ where the trauma is always ‘waiting to happen’ that arise specific to those traumas. Ego psychological concepts help to describe and delimit techniques involving reconstruction of pathogenic (past and present) events, and furthering processes of internalization, building psychic structures and representations. Finally, concepts from Ego Psychology, emphasizing individual psychic experience in all its depth and range, can offer nuanced guidelines to individualize and fine-tune dynamic assessment and psychoanalytically geared intervention leading to expansion and articulation of the interplay of all aspects of psychic process and mental life. In Europe , Ego Psychology can be defined as a necessary phase of psychoanalysis, as a school, and as an analytic perspective variously developed according to the personality of the psychoanalysts who dealt with, formulated it and were influential – before and after World War II in various strands of European psychoanalytic thinking and practice. In this context, if different protagonists and their special interests are fully articulated, it becomes apparent that many facets of Ego Psychology with its theoretical and clinical dimensions still represent an important though often neglected branch of psychoanalysis. From this point of view, it is true that psychoanalysts orient their work – as Otto Fenichel used to say – on the ego of their patients, but apparently do it so automatically that they sometimes fail to integrate this work into their self-image and their theory. In Latin America , the theory of contemporary Ego Psychology is not wide spread, however, as contradictory as it may sound, it is widely used in everyday psychoanalytic clinical practice. Ego Psychology’s influence is felt in: a. giving more immediate and constant attention to the flow of words, the sequence of associations, the inflection and tone of the voice, as well as other affective expressions in order to be able to detect the instinctual derivatives, that are on their way to conscious manifestations; b. sensitive tracking the obstacles and interference of the ego that considers these expressions perilous, and of the super ego that will judge them as unacceptable. While fact that the drives and unconscious fantasies are not discarded in (North American) Ego Psychology theory is not fully appreciated in Latin America, in practice it is understood (along the lines of Ego Psychology clinical technique) that the subtle and
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