You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Emanuel Windholz introduced the report, which was based on a research project1 concerning changes in the defenses of the ego during psychoanalysis. He briefly described the history of the project, which grew out of a purely clinical study of the analysis of a patient with an obsessive-compulsive character disorder. The study provided some preliminary formulations about the patient's defenses and how they changed during the course of the analysis; the research grew out of an attempt to extend these findings and to evaluate them.
Joseph Weiss presented a paper, "The Emergence of New Themes in Analysis: A Contribution to the Psychoanalytic Theory of Therapy," opening with the question: How does a patient become able to bring forth a previously warded-off mental content? A basic theoretical idea that has guided the group's thinking about this question is that the ego plays a predominant role in this process, ordinarily bringing warded-off contents to the surface only when it is safe to do so. This idea helps to account for the observation that the neurotic patient is not ordinarily overwhelmed, and hence traumatized, by the emergence of warded-off contents.
It is only in unusual circumstances in the analysis of a neurotic patient that the warded-off impulse overwhelms the ego defense and breaks through to the surface. When this does occur, the emergence of the impulse is more apt to be traumatic and disruptive than therapeutic. The patient is apt to rerepress the impulse as soon as he can, or, if he cannot repress it, he may retain it in consciousness as part of a symptom; or he may act it out.
An example of a theory which ignores the role of the ego in bringing