Are the Freuds’ Ego Psychology, Klein's Object Relations, Kohut's Self Psychology, and Beck's Cognitive Psychology All Alive and Well and Living in the Same Brain?1

Arnold Cooper has been a life-long synthesizer. In an effort to celebrate his contributions, this essay reflects a homespun effort at synthesis between drive psychology, self psychology, object relations, and cognitive science by an author who is master of none. Nevertheless, this paper will look at Anna Freud's ego mechanisms of defence from these four vantage points.

In his brief history of the cognitive revolution, Howard Gardner (1985) wrote that a crucial “feature of cognitive science is the deliberate decision to de-emphasize certain factors which may be important for cognitive functioning but whose inclusion at this point would unnecessarily complicate the cognitive-scientific enterprise. These factors include the influence of affective factors and emotions, the contribution of historical and cultural factors and the role of the background context in which particular actions or thoughts occur” (p. 6). In sharp contrast to cognitive science, the Freuds’ ego psychology is principally concerned with Gardner's three “complicating factors:” emotions, culture, and context. To de-emphasize these factors is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Similarly, self psychology and many advocates of object relations currently dismiss the drives, once so precious to psychoanalysis and still