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Federn's personality is expressed in everything he achieved in psychological investigation. His specific scientific aim was to clarify some of the components of our ego, of our own individual experience. The feeling of one's own being is the most fascinating field of psychology: our sensing of our own bodily and mental existence is even more mysterious than the origin and nature of life itself.
Indeed, Federn did not approach this very problem; he never said that he could explain the ego Erlebnis itself. What he did do was to apply consistently the economic, dynamic, and topographic viewpoints to the study of the dynamic functioning of the ego experience in its normal and morbid aspects.
He investigated the modes of ego operation, utilizing the material from the most accurate introspections of healthy and diseased persons. The knowledge thus acquired induced him to postulate a coherent ego cathexis unity as the metapsychological, dynamic basis of the ego experience.
To appreciate Federn's original contributions to ego psychology and to the understanding of psychoses, one must consider them in the light of Freud's psychoanalytic concepts, for Federn's ego psychology was a logical construct developed from his own intellectual independence and his unshakable loyalty to Freud. His intellectual independence made unavoidable certain differences between some of Freud's concepts and his own.