Rediscovery of Trust

The modern psychoanalytic interest in ego psychology elaborated by Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein¹ and broadened by the sociological studies of Erikson² emphasizes the integrative functions of the ego. This modern ego psychology has brought psychoanalysts closer to the viewpoints of phenomenology and existential philosophy which have been introduced into psychiatry by Freud's lifelong friend Ludwig Binswanger,³ by Minkowski,⁴ Boss,⁵ Erwin Strauss,⁶ and others. There are interesting parallels between Sullivan's studies of interpersonal relations,⁷ Horney's ideas about self-realization,⁸ Fromm's concept of freedom,⁹—all of these ideas and theories conceived in the United States, and Binswanger's “dual mode of existence,”³ Martin Buber's “I-Thou relation”¹⁰ and Berdyaev's idea about personal freedom,¹¹ which stem from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The merely scientific approach necessarily reduces a person under investigation to an object, a thing, an It. In contrast to the Thou of an interpersonal relation, an It is predictable material resulting from chains of cause and efect, to be grasped, defined, compared, and demonstrated to other observers. But the human being is not only a product of nature, nor is his development merely determined by a predictable course of history. The synthetic function of the ego does not create a closed, static system. Personality arises out of a creative process, surprisingly ever anew, integrating all that can become I to Thou. On one level, personality remains unpredictably free and open to its world and its future, although the freedom of creativity congeals ever again in the rigidities of inevitable objectivation. Personality is shaping its world and this world shapes the ego by processes of integration and disintegration which Freud reduced to objectified concepts of Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts.

From a subjective point of view the creative process of integration between the individual and his world is exper