Defense Mechanisms and Structure of the Total Personality

Authors who are concerned with the problems of analytic technique should first clarify their own attitude and take a positive or negative stand on different technical innovations. I would prefer, however, not to do this at present, being fully convinced that nothing new in principle would be offered were I to refer to the rôle, and consequently to the handling, of the superego during analysis.

Freud in his technical writings has stated often and in different ways that the analyst has to act as the counsel for the unconscious against the repressed forces. That the analyst represents a mild and understanding superego instead of a severe one, is often viewed as one of the most efficacious factors in analytic therapy. This helpful attitude of the analyst seems proper, especially as long as he concerns himself but little with the ego-reaction of the patient and is equally well disposed toward the emerging id-content. It was always the chief task of analysis to make the ego capable of bearing impulses emerging from the unconscious and to help integrate them.1

This task is not theoretical or one to be postponed as a synthesis after analysis. It is, on the contrary, the daily work of the analysis to release the ego, step by step, from its dependence and thereby to free it from the superior force of repressions.

We regard a part of these repressing forces as belonging to the ego. They are integrated as defense-mechanisms in the ego, and their function is to adjust the ego to the demands of the id and to the demands of the environment. Another part