Toward a Unified Psychoanalytic Theory

Foundation in a Revised and Expanded Ego Psychology

Morris N Eagle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032023168
• eBook ISBN: 9781000405071
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of th 2023 American Board and Academy of Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Psychology (ABAPPP) Annual Award!

This book aims to integrate different psychoanalytic schools and relevant research findings into an integrated psychoanalytic theory of the mind.

A main claim explored here, is that a revised and expanded ego psychology constitutes the strongest foundation not only for a unified psychoanalytic theory, but also for the integration of relevant research findings from other disciplines. Sophisticated yet accessible, the book includes a description of the basic tenets of ego psychology and necessary correctives and revisions. It also discusses research and theory on interpersonal understanding, capacity for inhibition, defense, delay of gratification, autonomous ego aims and motives, affect regulation, the nature of psychopathology; and the implications of a revised and expanded ego psychology for approaches to treatment.

The book will appeal to readers who are interested in psychoanalysis, the nature of the mind, the nature of psychopathology, and the implications of theoretical formulations and research findings for approaches to treatment. As such, it will also be of great value on graduate and training courses for psychoanalysis.

1

Ego psychology in Freudian theory

The concepts of ego and ego function are already present in Freud’s earliest writings and play a critical role in his development of psychoanalytic theory. As a central aspect of the Project, in which, as Strachey (1950 [1895]) observes in the Editor’s introducion to the Project, Freud attempted “a description of mental phenomena in physiological terms” (Freud, 1950 [1895], p. 292, Editor’s comments), he posited an ego structure, a main function of which is the inhibition of the flow of excitation from one neuron to another (Freud, 1950 [1895], pp. 323–324). Although Freud abandoned the Project, in his subsequent writings, he retained the central idea of a structure – the ego – that serves delay and inhibitory functions, inhibition now formulated in psychological rather than neurological language. As Strachey (1950 [1895]) writes, “In spite of being ostensibly a neurological document, the Project contains within itself the nucleus of a great part of Freud’s later psychological theories” (p. 290). Indeed, the birth of psychoanalysis is marked by the introduction of the concept of “defense hysteria” and the “cornerstone” concept of repression, which can be understood as an inhibitory ego process that prevents the emergence of unacceptable mental contents in conscious awareness. Freud (1894, p. 47) also writes that repression is triggered by “an occurrence of incompatibility” between an idea and the ego, which not only marks the introduction of the central role of inner conflict in psychopathology but can also be seen as a proto-formulation of the later id-ego or drive-defense model.

In his later writings, Freud (1926 [1925]) described repressive defenses as essentially inhibitory processes that in response to small doses of anxiety (signal anxiety) keep certain mental contents that, were they to be consciously experienced, would trigger traumatic anxiety. Since Freud’s original formulation, repression has been expanded to include not only the inhibition of anxiety-provoking mental contents, but also mental contents that may trigger other negative affects such as depression, guilt, shame, and threats to self-esteem (e.g., Brenner, 2002; Lewis, 1992; Morrison, 1989; Weiss & Sampson, 1986; Cramer, 2006, 2008, 2012). Thus, the essential function of repression and other defenses is to regulate negative affects through inhibitory processes that keep certain mental contents from being consciously experienced.

Capacity for inhibition as a fundamental psychological function

The importance of inhibition as a fundamental physiological and psychological process has a long history. For example, James (1890) wrote that inhibition is “not an occasional accident; it is an essential and unremitting element of our cerebral life” (p. 583). And much before that Descartes (1649 [1989]) wrote that “if anger makes the hand rise in order to strike, the will can ordinarily restrain it; if fear incites the legs to flee, the will can stop them” (p. 44). As another example of an early interest in inhibition, Ferrier (1876) observed that “besides the power to act in response to feeling or desires there is also the power to inhibit or restrain action, notwithstanding the tendency of feelings and desires to manifest themselves in active motor outbursts” (p. 282). Virtually a description of the relationship between id and ego and anticipating contemporary research on individual differences in inhibitory capacity, Ferrier also wrote, “If the centers of inhibitory, and thereby the faculty of attention, are weak, or present impulses unusually strong, volition is impulsive rather than deliberate” (p. 287). (See Smith [1992] for an extensive history of the concept of inhibition; See also Bari and Robbins [2013] for a brief and very useful review of theory and research on inhibition).

An early inhibitory function that Freud (1900) focused on is the capacity to delay gratification, which he viewed as a hallmark of ego functioning. He speculated that following the experience of satisfaction after being fed, the next time the infant is hungry, s/he hallucinates the breast. Hallucinatory wish fulfillment was for Freud, a quintessential instance of lack of inhibitory capacity, that is, a mode of primary process functioning characterized by a direct path from impulse to immediate discharge. According to this account, because hallucination of the breast does not satisfy hunger, the infant turns to the actual breast, which entails a primitive recognition of means-ends relationships as well as the necessity of delay until one finds an actual need expression of the gradual shift in the course of development from the predominance of the pleasure principle, characterized by immediate gratification and discharge, to the predominance of the reality principle, characterized by inhibition and delay of discharge.¹

To sum up, for Freud, ability to delay gratification is inextricably linked to one’s capacity to function in accord with the reality principle. In contrast to immediate gratification, delay of gratification, including delay of actions taken to achieve gratification, entails planning, assessing the consequences of one’s actions, and finding actual objects in reality necessary for gratification. Thus, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the ability to delay gratification is an important marker of the development of the ego and an important marker of intact ego functioning.²

Early research on the capacity for inhibition

The seminal idea of the ego as an inhibitory structure generated a good deal of psychoanalytically oriented research in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when the influence of ego psychology was predominant in psychoanalysis, at least in the United States. In one of the earliest papers on the research implications of the concepts of impulse control and delay of gratification, following a review of studies in that area, Singer (1955) concludes:

The concept of delay or impulse control as a basic ego function affords also a highly significant contact point between psychoanalytic theory and general psychology. More than fifty years after its original pronouncement, Freud’s theory of thought development is vigorously alive and beckons toward new vistas of research.

(p. 265)

With the waning of interest in developing a psychoanalytic general theory of mind and, in particular a waning of the influence of ego psychology, these new vistas never materialized, at least not within psychoanalysis.

The central themes running through the research reviewed by Singer were the ideas, one, that there is an inverse relationship between inhibition of action and thought; and two, that the ability to inhibit action is systematically related to thinking, planning, and imaginative activity. Some examples of early studies include the demonstration of a relationship between the ability to inhibit a motor response (e.g., to write as slowly as possible) and the inhibition of a cognitive response (e.g., refrain from giving a learned response in a word association task) (Meltzoff & Levine, 1954); the finding that immobilization of movement is associated with greater readiness to perceive motion in the autokinetic phenomenon and heightened motor activity with less readiness to perceive motion (Goldman, 1953); the finding that, following periods of motor inhibition, a greater number of human movement responses (M) are given on the Rorschach (Meltzoff, Singer, & Korchin, 1953); a lack of planfulness and a relative absence of “normal inhibitory pattern” shown in institutionalized children (Goldfarb, 1945); the finding that “adequate inhibition ability is an important factor in earning a high score on the intelligence test” (Levine, Glass, & Meltzoff, 1957, p. 43); the finding that among emotionally disturbed boys in a residential treatment center, compared to boys who were more capable of responding to a long-term incentive, those boys who were less capable of responding to a long-term incentive tended to experience time as passing more slowly (Levine & Spivack, 1959).

Delay of gratification as an inhibitory capacity

Mischel and his colleagues embarked on an extremely fruitful series of investigations referred to as the Marshmallow test on the correlates of immediate gratification of lesser rewards versus delayed gratification of larger rewards – one aspect of inhibitory capacity. In his earliest 1958 study, Mischel found that in children aged 7 to 9, absence of father was associated with preference for immediate gratification. In his 1961 study Mischel cites Freud’s (1922) “theoretical formulations [of] the ‘pleasure principle’ and the ‘reality principle’ ” (p. 1). In that study involving children aged 12 to 14, preference for delayed gratification was associated with higher social responsibility scores. Also, compared to students in juvenile delinquency schools, a significantly larger number of students in a government elementary school preferred delayed over immediate gratification. The former group of students tended to choose immediate gratification and showed less accuracy in recall of the time of an event (the year of the last national election). Interestingly, as noted previously, although Mischel (1958) refers to Freud’s distinction between the pleasure principle and the reality principle as a theoretical context for one of his early studies on delay of gratification, references to Freud drop out in subsequent studies.

The findings of these early studies suggest, one, that capacity to inhibit action is associated with greater cognitive activity; and two, that capacity to delay gratification (an inhibitory process) is associated with more adaptive behavior, including greater planfulness and social responsibility.

Later research on delay of gratification

Since Mischel’s 1958 and 1961 studies, many investigations have been carried out on the ability to delay gratification. Later studies on inhibitory capacity include a wide range of concurrent correlates and longitudinal predictors of individual differences in self-control inhibitory behaviors and capacities. Correlates of delay of gratification, self-control, and other inhibitory capacities include better academic performance, fewer reports of psychopathology, higher self-esteem, less binge eating and alcohol use, secure attachment, better interpersonal skills (Tangney, Baumeister, & Boone, 2004; Jacobsen, Huss, Fendrich, Kruesi, & Ziegenhain, 1997; Gillath, Shaver, & Mikulincer, 2005), resiliency and social competence (Eisenberg et al., 2003; and ego resilience (Funder & Block, 1989). Poor ability to delay gratification has also been shown to be associated with borderline personality disorder (Ayduk et al., 2008); gender differences (Bjorklund & Kipp, 1996; Silverman, 2003); and severity of psychological disturbance (Shybut, 1968)

There is a good deal of evidence that the executive function of inhibitory control in children, particularly in tasks involving conflict between dominant and subdominant responses, is significantly associated with performance on theory of mind tasks (e.g., Carlson, Moses, & Claxton, 2004). Carlson et al. (2004) note that what is reflected in theory of mind tasks is being able to hold in mind multiple perspectives (which requires working memory capacity) and inhibition of irrelevant perspectives. Carlson, Davis, and Leach (2005) presented a “Less is More” task to toddlers who must point to a smaller reward (two candies) to receive a larger reward (five candies). Performance on this task was significantly associated with aggregate scores on executive function tasks (which include conflict, delay, and working memory). In a variation of this procedure, children carried out the “Less is More” task with symbolic substitutes (i.e., rocks, dots, and elephant versus mouse) that represented the candies. The fascinating results obtained were as follows: Whereas compared to the real candy treat, the children did not perform significantly better in the rocks and dots conditions, they did perform significantly better in the elephant versus mouse condition. As the authors note, whereas in the rocks and dots conditions the symbols remain closely related to the enticing treat – numerosity remains visually present and salient – in the elephant versus mouse condition, because the symbols are more distant from the real reward, they lead to the greatest capacity for delay.

Similar to the early research, the findings of later research also indicate that capacity for inhibitory control, including capacity to delay gratification, is generally associated with more adaptive behavior and that relative inability to delay gratification is associated with maladaptive behavior.

Longitudinal studies on individual differences in inhibitory capacity

In addition to concurrent correlates of individual differences in inhibitory capacity, a number of longitudinal studies have shown that early individual differences in inhibitory capacity predict various aspects of subsequent development. In one study by Mischel, Shoda, and Peake (1988), children who are about 4.5 years of age who showed a high ability to delay gratification were rated by their parents as more academically and socially competent, verbally fluent, rational, attentive, playful, and able to deal with frustration during adolescence.

In a study carried out by Berman et al. (2013), children who were first tested for delay of gratification at age 4 were re-examined 40 years later on a task that required control over the contents of working memory. In the task, six words were presented for storage in working memory. Participants were instructed to forget three of the six words. A probe word was then presented and participants had to indicate whether it was one of the three words to be stored. Sometimes a “lure” word was presented that was one of the words to be forgotten. The participants’ reactions to these words were compared to control probe words that were not part of the six-word set. The results showed that compared to high delayers, low delayers were less accurate on this task and took longer to respond to “lure” than to control words. Berman et al. (2013) also obtained neural responses and report that compared to those classified as high delayers at age 4, low delayers “recruited neural networks less efficiently to achieve the same behavioral outcome” (p. 1375) when tested 40 years later. Berman et al. (2013) also reported the remarkable finding that one could predict with 71% accuracy whether a participant was a high or low delayer from the pattern of the neural data.

Drawing from the same sample as Berman et al. (2013), children who were tested for delay of gratification at age 4 were given a go/nogo task in their mid-40s in which they have to suppress a response to neutral, happy, and fearful faces Casey et al. (2011). The investigators found greater ventral striatal activity in low delayers in their attempt to suppress a response to the happy face, but not to a neutral or fearful face. This was interpreted as demonstrating the greater difficulty of low delayers in suppressing a response to “positive compelling cues” (p. 15001). Casey et al. (2011) note that the ventral striatal area of the brain is implicated in processing of desires and needs, as well as immediate versus delayed choice behavior. They also found “diminished recruitment of the right inferior frontal gyrus, which was involved ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Ego psychology in Freudian theory
• 2 Psychoanalytic ego psychology: Basic tenets
• 3 Critiques of ego psychology
• 4 Correctives and revisions
• 5 An expansion of ego psychology: Interpersonal reality-testing
• 6 Research and theory on interpersonal understanding
• 7 Ego functions, aims and motives
• 8 Psychoanalytic theories of affect and affect regulation
• 9 Research on affect regulation
• 10 Ego psychology and psychopathology
• 11 Ego psychology and psychoanalytic treatment
• 12 A unified psychoanalytic theory
• References
• Index