The Impact of Sight Loss in Social Work Practice
Francis K. O. Yuen, Carol B. Cohen, Kristine Tower in Disability and Social Work Education, 2013
The school of ego psychology stemmed from Freud’s structural model (id, ego, super-ego), and was further developed by his daughter Anna and her contemporaries including Heinz Hamman, Ernst Kris, Alfred Lowenstein, David Rapaport, and Erik Erikson (Goldstein, 1995). Ego psychology views disabilities as traumatic experiences, especially acquired disabilities and maintains a focus on ego functions and ego defenses (Grzesiak & Hicok, 1944). The most common used defenses in response to physical disability are denial, repression, projection, reaction formation, and regression (Cubbage & Thomas, 1989). Anna Freud (1952) is careful to remind us that the age of which the illness or disability emerges has a significant impact on one’s developing ego, identity, and body image.
Teaching a model of formulation for psychoanalytic assessment reports
Jed A. Yalof, Anthony D. Bram in Psychoanalytic Assessment Applications for Different Settings, 2020
While widely applicable, the model presented here is derived from psychoanalytic theory. Within psychoanalysis, there are many traditions, each offering a perspective on psychic development and conscious and unconscious functioning across the lifespan. Like psychological assessment, psychoanalysis was developed based on observations of behavior and language and provides a means of conceptualizing and articulating human experience. Many writers have discussed the application of psychoanalytic ideas to psychological assessment (Bram, 2017; Bram & Yalof, 2015; Kissen, 1986; Kleiger, 1997; Lerner, 1998, 2005, 2007; Schachtel, 1966; Yalof & Rosenstein, 2014; Yalof, 2016, 2019). These applications focus on the interaction of cognition, affect, intrapsychic conflict, and defenses, as well as character adaptation. Psychoanalytic ego psychology, in particular, lends itself to organizing the types of data psychological testing yields. With interests in patients’ reality testing and capacities to delay gratification, it is no surprise the pioneers of psychodiagnostic testing, David Rapaport, Merton Gill, and Roy Schafer, emerged from the ego psychological tradition (Rapaport, 1950a, 1950b, 1953; Rapaport et al., 1968; Schafer, 1954).
Developmental Issues in Recovery
Jacqueline Wallen in Addiction in Human Development, 2014
While Freud's theory focused rather narrowly on this aspect of the infant's experience, many modern psychodynamic theorists have broadened the classical perspective on infancy to include a wide range of experiences. Comparing traditional Freudian theory to neo-Freudian ego psychology, Stephen Johnson discusses the distinction between "conflict models" and "deficit models" of ego development or developmental arrest (1987). Freud's is a conflict model. It holds that development is shaped by how an individual resolves conflicting impulses, drives, or feelings at each stage of life. Developmental arrest occurs at points in development where these conflicts cannot be resolved and can be remediated only through uncovering and resolving these conflicts. A deficit model, more characteristic of ego psychology, or self theory, emphasizes developmental deficits rather than conflicts. In this view, developmental problems may often be resolved by strengthening the ego functions that were not initially adequate.
Hypnotic Ego-strengthening: Where We’ve Been and the Road Ahead
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2020
The development of ego psychology expanded the concept of the ego. Heinz Hartmann (1961) emphasized the autonomy of the ego. Rather than the ego emerging from the id as Freud believed, Hartmann theorized that the ego is a group of functions that include defenses and healthy adaptive mechanisms. Because these ego functions exist apart from frustration and conflict, he called them the conflict-free ego sphere. Hartmann (1961, 1965) made a strong case for the importance of development that comes from the infant’s interaction with the environment, and the adults in the environment. He was interested in the mechanisms that enabled human survival. From Hartmann’s perspective (1961, 1965), ego-strengthening occurs as a natural developmental process. The ego was to have a central role in personality organization. The degree of health or pathology depended on the ability of the ego and its strength to handle conflicting demands of the id, superego, and reality.
From the Traumatic Past to the Neurotic Present: The Evolution of Our Understanding
Published in Psychiatry, 2019
Freud’s biological thinking, which he never entirely abandoned (Sulloway, 1992) led to a “hydraulic” model of psychopathology: neurotic symptoms are seen as stemming from pent-up affective energy breaking through the barrier of repression. He had little to say about a possible biology of personality traits, which we now know are about 50% genetically determined. That said, Freud’s thinking was more nuanced than Robbins gives him credit for. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he explained childhood repetition compulsion as an attempt to gain mastery over fears of abandonment (not as breakthrough of repressed affect), a phenomenon only a step away from becoming a personality trait (Freud, 1920). Also, his shift of attention from id psychology to ego psychology – e.g. from primal sexual and aggressive drives to the mechanisms for controlling them – was a step down the path to personality traits via ego mechanisms of defense, although it was left to Anna Freud to elaborate on the concept and its implications for personality. (Freud, 1995)
Putting the Social Work Academy on the Couch: Exploring Emotional Resistance to Psychoanalytic Education
Published in Smith College Studies in Social Work, 2019
Modern conflict theory is an outgrowth of contemporary ego psychology and distinguished by its attention to “conflict, compromise formation, and unconscious fantasy” (Richards & Richards, 1995, p. 429). This approach was developed by a group of leading American émigré analysts from central Europe who trained in the late 1930s and 1940s, including Jacob Arlow, Charles Brenner, Leo Rangell, and Martin Wangh. They were later influenced by Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein (Richards & Lynch, 1998). These psychoanalytic pioneers critically studied the prominent American psychoanalytic perspective during that time (i.e., Ego Psychology), which largely focused on symptom formation, anxiety, impulse, and defense. Modern conflict theory (sometimes known as modern structural theory) emerged from this process. Prominent contemporary proponents of this approach include Sander Abend, Arnold Richards, Arlene Kramer Richards, Annie Reich, Dale Boesky, Magaret Brenman, and Allan Compton (Richards & Lynch, 1998; Richards & Richards, 1995). While there are differences among modern conflict theorists about whether structural concepts of id, ego, and superego should be retained, they agree on the importance of conflict between competing forces within the mind in all aspects of normal and pathological mental phenomena (Auchincloss, 2015; Auchincloss & Sandberg, 2012). This model operationalizes classical/ego psychological concepts into an experience-near theory that offers a unique formulation for each individual’s conflicts between their wishes (drive derivatives) and fears (originating in childhood) in the context of an unconscious fantasy (Brenner, 1982).
Related Knowledge Centers
- Consciousness
- Libido
- Perception
- Psychoanalysis
- Psychopathology
- Repression
- Id, Ego & Super-Ego
- Sense
- Stimulus
- Unconscious Mind