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.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS BEGINNING with the surge of interest in ego psychology have led us into a number of areas which now account for some of the excitement of our discipline. Studies of narcissism, object relations, borderline conditions, and altered ego states are but a few of the sectors of interest that have encouraged psychoanalysts to extend their scope of inquiry and also have produced significant reformations of theory. Several of these changes have extended our models so that some consider including interpersonalist schools, self psychology, and other variants which the psychoanalytic method itself is said to permit. On the other hand, during the first phase of ego psychology Anna Freud (1936) noted that prior to that time, one considered oneself an analyst only insofar as one was a depth psychologist. The question raised then also is relevant now. Is depth psychology essential to psychoanalysis? Or stated more boldly: has the proliferation of other "psychologies" led us afield from the initial aims of rendering the unconscious conscious so that the latter is less done than thought of? Has it become an aim that belongs to an antiquarian past?
Some thinkers believe that psychoanalysis became too mechanized following the introduction of the structural theory. Then Hartmann's views (1939) on adaptation became central to what is now generally considered to be the American school, and the