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The third chapter of Anna Freud's book begins with a recapitulation of the view that it is the analyst's work to ‘bring into consciousness that which is unconscious, no matter to which psychic institution it belongs’. And, as she puts it, ‘… when he sets about the work of enlightenment he takes his stand at a point equidistant from the id, the ego and the superego’ (30, 28)1.
As far as the id is concerned, the work of analysis reinforces the id's tendency to express itself on the surface. But the situation is different with the ego and the superego. The aim of the analyst and of the patient's ego are at variance with one another. Although the analyst and the patient's ego work together during the analysis in the process of self-observation, the ego is biased, distorting and rejecting certain facts. Moreover, the ego's unconscious operations are themselves the object of analysis, and naturally it resists the process of making them conscious.
Anna Freud points out (32, 30) that ‘in analysis all the material which assists us to analyse the ego makes its appearance in the form of resistance to the analysis of the id.’ While there are other sources of resistance (transference resistance and the working of the repetition compulsion) it is important to analyse the ego resistances in order to make conscious the unconscious defences of the ego, which show themselves as a strengthening of defensive measures and as hostility to the analyst.
The ego not only defends itself against instinctual impulses and their derivatives, but also against the affects associated with such impulses (e.g. love, longing, jealousy, mortification, pain and mourning). The fate of an affect is not necessarily the same as that of the ideational content of the instinctual demand, but a knowledge of the way the