1. The Concept Id

I have already alluded to the extent to which ego psychology has dominated our discussions of structural concepts. And yet as late as 1936 Anna Freud introduced The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense with the following statement:

There have been periods in the development of psychoanalytical science when the theoretical study of the individual ego was distinctly unpopular…. Whenever interest was transferred from the deeper to the more superficial psychic strata—… from the id to the ego—it was felt that here was a beginning of apostasy from psycho-analysis as a whole [p. 3].

In 1952 Hartmann pointed out: “Only in the 20s was ego psychology explicitly defined as a legitimate chapter of analysis” (p. 156).

The “ascendancy” of the ego in Freud's thinking was a very gradual process. However, an awareness of the ego's importance was always there, and even semantically formulated. The following (unpublished) letter to Jung (written on December 19, 1909)1 indicates that what might have appeared to be lack of insight was actually conscious restraint:

… We have already agreed that the basic mechanism of neurosogenesis is the antagonism between the instinctual