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Psychotherapy of the Submerged Personality is an important and intriguing volume inspired by the unique theoretical and technical contributions of Dr.
Alexander Wolf. Dr. Wolf, a psychoanalyst and renowned pioneer in the development of psychoanalytic group therapy, has been studying psychopathologies which compromise the authenticity of individual self-experience for the past forty years. He has been especially interested in a particular distortion of personality, which he originally termed “diegophrenia,” and which he currently characterizes as “submerged personality.” In the course of his work with patients suffering from this psychopathology, Dr. Wolf concurrently developed his own humanistic vision of the psychoanalytic enterprise as a means of liberating the individual's “submerged ego.” In Dr. Wolf's theoretical formulations, the term “submerged ego” denotes the suppression of the patient's authentic feelings, perception, judgement, reality testing, creativity, — in short — of all the ego functions that are fundamental to the development of authentic selfhood. In this volume, Dr. Wolf is joined by an expanding circle of clinical associates for a presentation of their latest thinking on the etiology, dynamics, and psychoanalytic treatment of the “submerged personality.”
The authors hypothesize that submerged personality is developmentally determined by a derailment of “ego emergence,” an aspect of the separation-individuation process. In their view, “ego emergence” is thwarted by a primary love object who reacts to expressions of the child's growing autonomous ego functioning with hostility, emotional withdrawal, depression, or constriction of her emotional responsiveness. Such unfavorable reactions to the child's “ego emergence” transform the exercise of ego functioning into a danger situation which threatens the loss of relatedness with the needed primary love object. Insofar as the child circumvents this danger by suppressing these expressions of his innate