Psychoanalysis as a general psychology, revisited

My paper focuses on the émigrées from Vienna. Why, you may ask, turn once more to them, more particularly to Heinz Hartmann and Erik Erikson? There are a number of answers one might give, each of which would provide a lens for examining the subject. What I want to do is to take an ‘internalist’ approach, to concentrate on the logic of theory itself — admittedly at the expense of the personal, the social and the institutional. What concerns me is where Hartmann and Erikson were coming from, intellectually that is, what objectives they set themselves, what theoretical strategies and tactics they devised and whether more than a generation later — to continue the military metaphor — their campaign plans are still operational.

I should say a word about where I am coming from. I have approached psychoanalytic ego psychology by a curious route, by way of Britain. Over the last decade and a half I first applied and then studied — another curious sequence — British object-relations theory. Then for comparative purposes I looked at what had happened on this side of the Atlantic, at what had happened after