You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The subject matter of the previous section of our discussion dealt with what takes place in psychoanalytic interpretation: the interference in the play of psychic forces (dynamics) and the alteration of the distribution of psychic energy (economics). We can best elucidate what has been said if we now begin with a third point of view, the structural. To what extent does the interpreting analyst work upon the ego, and to what extent upon the id and the superego?
In a direct sense the analyst works exclusively upon the ego. We need only to think of the definition of the ego: as soon as an ego exists at all, through it every influence of the environment upon the psyche takes place; the understanding of the meaning of words is particularly a concern of the ego. To be sure, the id can also be changed by experiences. Fixations, in so far as they are conditioned by particular satisfactions or privations, are alterations in the domain of the id brought about by experience. Likewise regressions, although we call them 'defenses', give the impression of a general tendency of the id in the case of loss of satisfactions to reach back to situations where things were otherwise. We speak of 'instinct structures', that is, id formations which come about through the alternate action of satisfactions and deprivations. But all these influences of the environment upon the id always take place indirectly by way of the ego. If the ego did not undertake instinctual activities, no instinctual tendency could be canalized in the id; if the ego did not set up defenses, the id would remain unaltered. When through analytic treatment we make possible genital primacy, that is certainly an alteration of the id; but it comes about through influencing the ego.