Ego Psychology

Erik Erikson
Date: The late 1930’s forward
Type of psychology: Personality
Field of study: Personality theory
Ego psychology, pioneered by Erikson, Heinz Hartmann, Erich Fromm, Harry Stack
Sullivan, and Karen Horney, provided a significant new reformation to the personality
theory of Freudian psychoanalysis. Erikson’s theory of the growth of the ego
throughout the life cycle provided an especially important contribution to this movement.

Key concepts
• ego
• id
• psychoanalysis
• psychosocial
• unconscious

Ego psychology emerged in the late 1930’s as a reform movement within
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, as developed by Sigmund Freud in the previous
three decades, was an innovative approach to understanding psychological
life. Freud developed the methodology and vocabulary to focus on the
meaningfulness of lived experience. For Freud, the true meaning of an experience
was largely unconscious. Dreams, slips of the tongue or pen, and
symptoms provided examples of such unconscious layers of meaning. In psychoanalytic
terminology, beneath the level of the conscious ego, there is an
unconscious substructure (the id). Freud used the metaphor of an iceberg
to relate these two levels, indicating that the conscious level is analogous to
the small, visible tip of an iceberg that shows above the water, whereas the
unconscious level is like its large, underwater, invisible mass. The ego, this
small surface level of the personality, “manages” one’s relations with the
world beyond the psyche. The id, in contrast, is “intrapsychic” in the sense
that it is not in a relation with the “outer” world beyond the psyche. Rather,
the id draws its energy from the biological energy of the instinctual body
(such as instincts for sex and aggression). In this traditional psychoanalytic
theory, then, the conscious level of the person is rooted in, and motivated
by, an unconscious level, as psychological life is ultimately rooted in biological
forces.

Freudian psychoanalysis advanced psychology by legitimating the study
of the meaningfulness of human actions, but it did so at the price of conceiving
of conscious, worldly experience as being only a surface, subtended by
unconscious, biological forces, mechanisms cut off from worldly involvement.
By the late 1930’s, some psychoanalysts had concluded this was too steep a price to pay. The first to formulate these objections systematically was
Heinz Hartmann, whose writings between 1939 and 1950 advanced the argument
for the autonomy of the ego as a structure of the personality independent
of the domination of the unconscious id. It was Hartmann who
gave to this protest movement the name “ego psychology.”
In the next generation of analysts, this movement found its most articulate
voices: Erich Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, and Erik
Erikson. Writing from the 1940’s through the 1980’s, all contributed independently
to a perspective that grants to the ego a status much more significant
than its role in Freudian psychoanalysis. For them, it is people’s relations
with the world (and not their subterranean biological energy) that is
the most important aspect of their psychological life. For this reason, these
psychologists have also sometimes been known as the “social” or “interpersonal”
analysts. While all four have unquestionably earned their enduring
international reputations, Erikson became the most well known, on account
of his formulation of a powerful and comprehensive developmental theory
to account for the growth of the ego throughout life.

Freud had asserted that the ego was a weak aspect of the personality,
whereas Hartmann posited a strong ego. However, there are wide individual
differences in ego strength. Erikson demonstrated how ego strength emerges
across stages of a person’s development and showed that its particular
growth depends on the quality, at each stage, of a person’s relations with the
world and with other people.