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Paul Federn's place in the development of psychoanalysis has not been properly appreciated. He was the first analyst to treat psychotics, and he contributed to the psychology of dreams. Yet his most important contribution, his ego psychology, has remained on the periphery of psychoanalytic thinking. At the core of Federn's ego psychology is the concept of ego feelings which he defined as 'an enduring feeling and knowledge that our ego is continuous and persistent … that processes within us … have a persistent origin within us, and that our body and psyche belong permanently to our ego'. We become aware of these feelings only when the ego fails to fulfil its functions adequately and automatically. We can detect them in states of depersonalization and derealization and through self-observation in the twilight states between sleep and wakefulness.
Federn distinguished between mental ego feelings, bodily ego feelings, and superego feelings. The ego can be experienced as both subject and object. The ego boundary exists between the ego feelings and the mental representation of the outer world. Psychotics especially fear the loss of this boundary and of the ego continuity that goes with it.
Federn's theories are conceived mainly in freudian prestructural terms and contribute to the phenomenological knowledge of the ego states. Freud's later emphasis on development and structural differentiation is absent. Federn has gained importance in recent years with the developing interest in the study of the psychoses. This is a good review of his ideas.