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The history of psychoanalysis has been a history of polemics, and until very recently the history has been written exclusively by participants, so historiographically, too, polemics have been the norm. Analysts have grouped into camps and condemned their enemies, and in their roles as historians they have supplied their camps with theoretical weapons. The first major contribution to the process was Freud's History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (), in which he attacked Adler and Jung, thereby rescuing his Libido Theory from their attacks. Since then, from the (Sigmund) Freudian point of view, which Anna Freud subscribed to, the libido theory, or more generally the theory of instinctual drives has always needed protecting, never more than in the later years of Anna Freud's life at the ascendancy of the British object relations trend when Anna Freud wrote her classic, Normality and Pathology in Childhood () through the present time, twenty years after her death in 1982, when the object relations tradition became mainstream.
In the polemic-rich history of psychoanalysis since Freud's death, the chief protectors of his theory of instinctual drives have been placed, often by themselves and always by their enemies, under the rubric “ego psychology.” It is ironic that this designation was first used to brand and dismiss Adler, whose ego psychology was heretical to Freud because it overplayed the ego instincts and underplayed the sexual instincts. But in the 1930s, in the wake of Freud's articulation of the structural theory in works like The Ego and the Id (), ego psychology took on a positive meaning for those who were allied under its banner (a meaning that had nothing to do with the ego instincts, which had been relegated to an ignored subdivision of Eros, the life instincts). Ego psychology was the complement to id psychology; it showed all the ways in which the ego developed out of the id, the reservoir of instinctual drive, and came to be—in healthy people—master in t