Heinz Hartmann

1 A salient point in comparing Freud's theory of the Ego with Hartmann's is the conception of the relations between internal and external reality. It goes back to the nature of the relationship between the pleasure principle, the reality principle, and the functions of the Ego. Although Hartmann emphasises the way his own positions are characterised by resonance and continuity with Freud's, his conception of the Ego's genesis and primary autonomy offers significant alternatives to the Freudian conceptions of the Ego's development and functions.

Though he acknowledged his place in Freudian developments of the concept of the Ego from a predominantly defensive and inhibitory agency to a structure with complex functions of organisation and adaptation to external reality, Hartmann nevertheless identifies a variable in the development of the Ego's functions, a variable that is partly independent of the adaptive processes dictated by external reality as they had been described by Freud. Indeed, for Freud the transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle happened at a certain point in the individual's development when the Ego's drives submitted to the influence of the reality principle and the Ego had to settle for representing «the real conditions of the external world» to itself, attempting to modify external or internal reality (Freud, 1911).

Hartmann considers this theory of the relationship between internal and external reality an anticipation of Ego Psychology, but holds that it is necessary to presume that in the process of acknowledging external reality there are elements present from birth which will constitute the Ego's sphere of autonomous development; a partly primary «independent variable» of the Ego: «whether the ego plays a primary role in the institution of the reality principle will be answered differently, according to whether we view the ego as an agent active from the

beginning […] or as something traceable only to the impact of the in