Ego Development

Theoretical Contributions

Sigmund Freud, in his 1926 monograph Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, posited that instinctual drives (id), moral and value judgments (superego), and requirements of external reality all make demands upon an individual. The ego mediates between these conflicting pressures and creates the best conscious and unconscious solution, compromise, or adaptation. Through maturing ego functions, the ego manages internal aggressive and libidinal impulses and, in balancing internal needs and external expectations, facilitates the individual’s adaptation to external reality (or not). The ego may also develop abnormally, so that there is only a fragile or even nonexisting adaptation to external reality.

Following Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalysts most responsible for the development of ego psychology, and its systematization as a formal school of psychoanalytic thought, were Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann (with Rudolph Lowenstein and Ernst Kris), David Rappaport, Margaret Mahler, Edith Jacobson, and Erik Erikson. Anna Freud focused on the ego’s unconscious, defensive operations, linking the stages of psychosexual development during which different defenses originated. For Anna Freud, understanding how the ego defensively kept thoughts and feelings out of consciousness was most important both to working therapeutically with adults and children and also to understanding psychopathology across development.

Hartmann and colleagues advanced the focus on adaptation by putting forth the idea that the ego includes innate capacities (e.g., language, attention, memory, motor coordination) facilitating individuals’ adaptation to their environment. Under what Hartmann called an average expectable environment, these capacities developed autonomously from the influence of libidinal and aggressive drives. Hartmann and colleagues recognized that conflict is a part of the human condition, and certain ego functions may become conflicted by aggressive and libidinal impulses, as seen, for example, in eating disorders and attention-deficit disorders. For Hartmann, the developmental task for the individual as well as a therapeutic focus was to diminish the impact of libidinal and aggressive conflicts and expand the range of conflict-free spheres of ego functions to facilitate a healthy and flexible adaptation of the individuals to their environment.