The Genealogy of the Ego Ideal

THE ADOLESCENT PERIOD LENDS ITSELF PARTICULARLY WELL TO THE study of psychic structures in relation to origin, content, and function. While psychic structures, at this advanced state of development, are essentially formed and integrated, it remains a characteristic of adolescence—or of the biphasic development of sexuality in the human species—that a process of psychic restructuring is evoked by pubertal maturation. The course of the ensuing emotional instability is marked by more or less disintegrative processes of a regressive nature, but simultaneously we can also observe a vigorous and integrative forward movement in personality formation. Integration and consolidation proceed in a seesaw fashion with violent or mild, extended or brief alternations of regressive and progressive movements. The relative openness and fluidity of the personality during this period of psychic restructuring grant the psychoanalytic observer of personality development the opportunity to gain important insights into structure formation and transformation which no other period in human life offers in any comparable manner. The dramatic reverberations of this process in the life of the adolescent have never failed, throughout history, to be noticed and recorded.

In the course of my psychoanalytic studies I have used this natural laboratory setting of psychic restructuring in adolescence for the investigation of those structures that are most decisively affected by the adolescent process. The present study extends this research to the ego ideal. Popular observation and academic psychology have always emphasized the proclivity of youth for high