(1952). Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 21:574-576 International Journal of Psychoanalysis. XXXII, 1951: Ego and Reality. Hans Loewald. Pp. 10–18. Freud considers the ego as the agency of defense within the psychic apparatus, differentiated from the id through the id's exposure to external reality. The ego has to defend itself against id, external reality, and superego. On the other
hand, in his elaboration of the concept of primary narcissism, Freud comes to recognize that at that early stage, psychologically speaking, ego and reality are still a unitary whole from which both become gradually differentiated as separate structures. Nevertheless, Freud understands even the synthetic function of the ego as basically a defense mechanism, and reality, in psychoanalytic theory, is essentially a hostile force, antagonistic to the psychic apparatus. The original identity of ego and reality is connected, in experiential terms, with the original oneness of infant and mother. The view of reality as a hostile antagonist is connected with the emphasis on the hostile, castrating role of the father prevailing in psychoanalytic descriptions of the psychosexual development which culminates in the Oedipus situation. The concept of reality as antagonistic to the individual is expressed in the predominant role which the hostile father figure plays in psychoanalytic theory. The synthetic-integrative function of the ego must derive from the original identity between ego and reality in the primary narcissistic position, when there are as yet no boundaries between the two. In order to further the understanding of the development of ego-reality integration, an attempt is made to clarify the elements entering into the formation of the Oedipus complex. It is pointed out that a profoundly ambivalent relationship develops between child and mother, as well as between child and father. Neither is the relationship with the mother wholly positive, nor is that with the father only hostile-submissive. While the original identity with the mother develops gradually into a libidinal tension system between child and mother—into a positive libidinal relationship—there is also an equally powerful need for emancipation from the mother based in part on a dread of the womb, a dread of sinking back into the unstructured state of identity with her. Correspondingly, before the time of the hostile-submissive relationship to the father coming to its climax at the stage of the castration complex, there exists a primary masculine identification of the boy with his father. Freud has described this constellation in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in which he states that this masculine identification helps to prepare the Oedipus situation. The original identity with the mother and its derivative, the libidinal relationship to the mother, remains the deepest source of the ego's synthetic activity in which it integrates with its reality. But reality is also characterized by differentiation and objectivity as it develops in the maturation process of the ego. The father is the figure who, through primary identification and through his interference with the libidinal relationship of the child with the mother, promotes the emancipatory and objectivating tendencies that lead to the organization of a reality which is distinct from the ego, a development that reaches its first phase of culmination in the Oedipus situation. Defense, then, would be directed against the loss of reality rather than against reality—and this in a twofold sense. Reality may be lost if the boundaries between ego and reality disappear—the threat of regression to identity of ego and reality, the threat of the all-engulfing womb. Reality also may be lost if libidinal objects, love objects, are cut off altogether—the situation of the paternal castration threat. Schizophrenia, as Paul Federn, for instance, has understood it, is a clinical
example of the loss of boundaries between ego and reality. The essential phenomenon seems to be not a (defensive) withdrawal from reality but rather a loss of boundaries, so that both ego and reality regressively change to more primitive levels of organization in which they are less distinct from each other. This is the reason for the observation that there is no transference in narcissistic affections. There is not a lack of relatedness; rather the relatedness is of the narcissistic-magical type in which reality is as yet not objective. In this type neither the process of individuation of the individual nor the process of objectivation of objects—persons—has developed far enough to make transference in the Oedipal and postoedipal sense possible. The psychological constitution of reality is a genetic-dynamic process just as much as the progressive organization of the ego is such a process. Ego and reality, from a dynamic point of view, cannot be considered separately because they evolve together and in mutual interaction in successive stages of ego reality integration. AUTHOR'S ABSTRACT
Article Citation [Who Cited This?](1952). International Journal of Psychoanalysis. XXXII, 1951. Psychoanal Q., 21:574-576 |
