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Psychoanalysis encounters the issue of adaptation in three forms: as a problem of its ego psychology, as a therapeutic aim, and as an educational consideration. It is striking that while the concept “ego syntonic” is fairly well defined, experience shows that the term “reality syntonic” is so elastic that it covers diverse and even partly contradictory views.
Psychoanalysis alone cannot solve the problem of adaptation. It is a subject of research for biology and sociology also. However, the important insights psychoanalysis has given, and will give, into adaptation could hardly be attained by the other approaches and methods. Therefore we have the right to expect that all investigations of the problem of adaptation take into account the fundamental facts and relationships discovered by psychoanalysis. The increase of our interest in the problems of adaptation is due mainly to those developments in psychoanalysis which focused our attention on ego functions; but it was also fostered by our increased interest in the total personality, as well as by the concern over certain theoretical formulations about mental health, which use “adjustment to reality” as a criterion.
I shall have to touch on some matters which are well known, on some which may be controversial, and on a few which are not, strictly speaking, psychoanalytic. But all that