The Observing Ego as a Compromise Formation

With the advent of ego psychology in 1923, as Freud introduced his tripartite structural model of the mind, it became possible to appreciate the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis as involving the formation of an observing ego which collaborates with the analyst in the analysis of the patient's unconscious conflicts. Freud (1937) believed that the analyst must enter into an alliance with the patient's ego to subdue certain uncontrolled portions of the id in order to include them in a synthesis of the ego. Sterba (1934) is the analyst best remembered for giving the concept of the observing ego a central place in the therapeutic process of psychoanalysis. According to Sterba, the analyst forms an alliance with that aspect of the patient's ego which functions to test reality and develop an objective perception of it. By forming an alliance wiui the patient's reality testing, a split is effected in the ego, creating an observing ego which examines an experiencing ego as an object of “intellectual contemplation” (p. 121).

The subject's consciousness shifts from the center of affective experience to that of intellectual contemplation … there must be a certain amount of positive transference, on the basis of which a transitory strengthening of the ego takes place through identification with the analyst. This identification is induced by the analyst. From the outset the patient is called upon to cooperate with the analyst against something in himself. (p 121)