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The essay which follows, “The Emotionally Disturbed Child as a Family Scapegoat” by Ezra F. Vogel and Norman W. Bell, is illustrative of the relevance of current work in the behavioral sciences for the field of psychoanalysis. As ego psychology has begun to focus upon problems of normal adaptation, it has recognized a serious lack of both concepts and terminology with which to characterize ordinary behavioral interaction.
Psychoanalysis has provided a frame of reference for dealing with psychopathology in terms of defense mechanisms, i.e. projection, repression, regression, etc. However, these mechanisms have only abstract significance until they are supplied with a specific emotional content, and such libidinal drives as anality and orality have more clinical than adaptive significance.
The affective component of adaptation seems to be most clearly understood when stated in terms of readily recognized emotions, such as fear, hate, affection, etc. These emotional contents lend a readily communicated meaning to a given mental mechanism. For example, when we state that a person is projecting jealousy or hostility, we are much closer to his psychic reality than if we merely say that he is prone to use projection as a defense, or that he is projecting oral impulses.
Psychoanalytic theory has tended to regard defense mechanisms as being located within a single individual, a fact which limits their