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.
Freud's hope that psychoanalysis would some day become a general psychology has already been partly realized by the work of Hartmann, Erikson, Kris, Jacobson, Anna Freud, Greenacre, Rapaport, Mahler and other psychoanalytic ego psychologists. These workers have correlated instinct theory in particular with personality theory in general, through emphasis on the flexible and the enduring functions of the ego. This approach can be viewed as an indirect outgrowth of Freud's formulation “where id was, there shall ego be.”
This broadening and sharpening of theory has generated new clinical applications. For example, although for historical reasons Freud was dubious about the treatability of ego pathology derived from structural transformations of the ego (e.g., “unreliable characters”), psychoanalytic ego psychology has widened the scope of psychoanalytic therapy to include some of these types. By providing a theoretical understanding of ego deficiencies resulting from unusual conflicts between ego and id, and between ego and reality, during the pregenital period of development, these insights have also afforded new dimensions in the treatment of classical oedipal neuroses. Hartmann's conceptualizations in particular, although being frequently many steps removed from the clinical situation and requiring imaginative extrapolations, have influenced the solution of a wide variety of similar clinical problems and of their counterparts in normal development.
These essays comprise a collection of Hartmann's previously-published papers. The volume is divided into two parts, each arranged chronologically. Part I contains sixteen papers written and published between 1939 and 1959. Part II contains four recently-translated earlier papers, originally written and published in German. The twenty papers are arranged as chapters. The collection clearly illustrates the germinal appearance, the gradual development, and the integration of Hartmann's theoretical concepts. It marks out the dif