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The problem of the ego figures importantly in the psychoanalytic literature of the last thirty years. A good many of these studies, however, have not only failed to give us a clearer understanding of this highly complex issue, but rather have served even further to confuse our ideas about it.
This impression of confusion becomes especially marked when we compare these recent contributions with the last writings of Freud (An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1938), where we find the most valid hypotheses on this subject lucidly stated in a few lines.
Ever since I presented a paper on ego functions at the First Franco-British Reunion of Psychoanalysts in Paris in June, 1939,2 I have been reproached with oversimplification by some of those who in the meantime have pressed forward very far with their investigations of this problem. If I may judge from the publications of the last few years, the opposite tendency undoubtedly has prevailed since. These works precisely illustrate an aspect of the development of our science whose alarming possible consequences I wish to emphasize.
As an example, let us take the highly thoughtful and persevering studies of Hartmann, which are almost entirely devoted to the problem of the ego and in which the author develops some very personal views on the question. If I understand his conception correctly, the ego would not consist exclusively in a differentiation of the id under the influence of the reality of the environment; partly, it would have an origin of its own—autonomous and independent of the id—and be endowed with equally autonomous functions and energic sources.
After referring to the theory advanced by Freud, according to which "id and ego are originally one," and after he has himself stressed the fact that "both the ego and the id have developed, as products of differentiation, out of the matrix of animal instinct," Hartmann takes the unexpected line of declaring that a part of the ego is, nevertheless, of autonomous origin. At this