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.
HARTMANN (1950), DEFINING THE TERM "EGO" in negative respects, states that "'ego,' in analysis, is not synonymous with 'personality' or with 'individual'; it does not coincide with the 'subject' as opposed to the 'object' of experience, and it is by no means only the 'awareness' or the 'feeling' of one's own self. In analysis the ego is a concept of quite a different order" (p. 114). Other central concepts in analysis also need to be periodically redefined, to separate them from contiguous states, reassert their pathognomonic features, and establish their special meaning within psychoanalytic theory. The concept of self has most recently gone through a period of such perspective and redefinition. The same needs to be done for the object.
The role of the object in psychic life and the place it occupies in explanatory theory have taken a fluctuating and inconsistent path during the development of psychoanalytic theory. Questions concerning the object have traversed a wide range, which includes: which aspects of external relationships constitute the actual objects toward which internal forces from the subject self are directed; how essential or dispensable those objects are; and whether there is such a "thing" as an object objectively—this last has been alluded to by Compton and Sachs