Ego

The model of ego development by Loevinger describes an epigenetic series of successive stages comprising increasingly complex styles of impulse control, interpersonal relationships, moral and cognitive reasoning. This model offers an opportunity to explore the structural premises young adults rely on solving their developmental tasks. Controls compared to patients show a significantly superior intrapsychic coping, awareness of social rules and knowledge of interpersonal relations.

This paper traces the transformation of narcissism, paralleling the transformations of object love, occurring between early and late adolescence. Narcissism is examined in terms of three lines of development: erotic self-love, omnipotence, and the regulations of self-esteem. The transition occurs relatively rapidly in most normal and psychoneurotic individuals and involves a massive reorganization of the psyche. The acquisition of a body image of an adult sort probably acts an organizer. A normal consequence is the first romantic love relationship.

The development of narcissism is usually studied from the standpoint of the drives, or more specifically of the libido. This paper considers narcissism from the standpoint of the ego and seeks to delineate separate developmental lines. From this point of view, a variety of forms may be distinguished which are ordinarily structured during the oedipal period. It is postulated that narcissism cannot be considered as truly separable from the vicissitudes of the love and hate of objects.

Freud saw war as the prevailing of death over love, this being a metapsychological concept whose roots lie in the dynamics of urges within the individual and civilisation in general. In his opinion, this dialectic tension could not be overcome. Reich noted that the analytic theory was in conflict with practice. Freud's premisses concerning the philosophy of civilisation and their implications have been taken up by Marcuse, who solves the conflict between the love-death urges by treating work as reduced to love or a game, in which death is merely the negative to be overcome.

This paper examines the long-term issues of sexual dysfunction in terms of normal psychosexual development. Human sexual development and ego growth take simultaneous origin within the symbiotic relationship of the child and its first nurturant caretaker, usually the mother. Infantile sexuality, the pleasure of the total body, is equivalent to love and dependent upon sameness and continuity, tending toward fusion. Adult sexuality depends for its emotional impetus upon separateness and difference between lovers.

Suicidality should not, in consideration of the present studies and the experience gained by the author, be considered a disease 'sui generis', but rather a symptom only. The etiopathogenesis of "nonpsychotic" suicidality is discussed with particular reference to the psychopathology thereof. Acts of suicide are most often part of "lasting affective reactions".

What I believe to be the essential contribution of this group of analysts may be summarized as follows. The role of object relations has always been a prominent theme in analytic thought and has become much more so in recent years. Instead of grafting the implications of relations onto a theory that started from a different standpoint, what the British group has done is to show that the development of the person has to be conceived as the progressive differentiation of a structure from a unitary matrix that itself interacts at a holistic personal level from the start.

A discussion of "Self Psychology and the Distinctiveness of Psychotherapy," by Arnold Goldberg, M.D. Arnold Goldberg's applications of self psychology to psychotherapy help conceptualize psychoanalytic psychotherapy, contribute to technique, and provide new goals. Self psychology is formulated in terms of an intrapsychic focus and other psychoanalytic considerations of clinical process, is consistent with advances in the psychoanalytic study of object relations, and advances the clinical theory of psychoanalysis.

The roles of the archaic loving and hating introjects are traced in the early scientific romances and the life work of H.G. Wells. The preambivalent polarization of the early loving introjects of an archaic ego ideal (giving rise to utopian fantasies and, later, to promulgations of a new world state) and the early hostile introjects of an archaic superego (giving rise to fears of death and, later, to fears of cosmic dissolution) is represented in eschatological preoccupations with death, the Last Judgment, heaven and hell.

There is, in my opinion, a rapprochement between the theories of psychoanalysis and existential-phenomenology. It is my major theoretical interest to articulate the points at which true dialogue between these different perspectives is possible. Such an effort is not an attempt to merge the two theories or subordinate one to the other; rather, I hope that the theoretical positions of both will be clarified and that the therapeutic dialogue of practitioners who represent both perspectives will be benefited.