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Morris Eagle's latest book is a thorough and thought-provoking reflection on the possibility of unifying the disparate schools of psychoanalysis under the umbrella of a revised and expanded ego psychology, an ambitious and impressive undertaking that has elicited fulsome praise from Peter Fonagy, Glen Gabbard and Jerome Wakefield. Given the sheer number of psychoanalytic orientations competing for adherents nowadays, however, many skeptics argue that this is an impossible task, because the models of the mind and methods of treatment advanced by these diverse school are fundamentally incommensurable. But Eagle is undeterred, arguing that a unified theory is both possible and highly desirable for analytic theory and practice, and for analysts and patients alike.
“Where id was, there shall ego be”. So said Freud, who described his dictum as the “the categorical imperative of psychoanalysis”. One interpretation of this maxim is that analytic treatment seeks to render the unconscious conscious, and to make the ego the center of psychic life. Eagle takes this line of thought farther, arguing that Freud here “addresses the question of psychobiological drives achieving representation in the subjective experience of ‘I desire’ or ‘I need’ or ‘I fear’. For example, how does one get from the biological level of neural firings, hormonal secretions, low blood sugar to ‘I am hungry’ or ‘I have sexual desire or a sexual fantasy’; Freud was quite familiar with Kant's writings. His concept of the ego or I can be traced back to conceptually to Kant's ‘transcendental ego’ in the sense that in both contexts, the ego or I is the precondition for experience, that is, makes possible experience as my experience, as well as the unity of consciousness (p. 271)”
Ironically, perhaps, Kant did not believe that psychology actually could be a bona fide science at all. But as Eagle points out, ego psychologists like Anna Freud and above all, Heinz Hartmann, sought to fulfill Freud's ambition of tran