Integrated Ego Psychology

David P. Farrington, David P. Farrington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351512190
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Ego psychology is the aspect of psychoanalytic theory concerned with how people adapt to the demands and possibilities of their worlds in accordance with their inner requirements. All substantial theories of personality refer to adaptation, but there are several features special to ego psychology. It offers by far the most elaborate picture of the adaptive apparatus and of the varied devices humans have for negotiating among their drives and their life situations. More than any other theory of psychology, it emphasizes the complicated transactions that go on in people's minds, of which many are outside conscious awareness. Norman A. Polansky argues that we must be disciplined enough to commit ourselves to one consistent line of theory if we are to harness reasoning to go beyond what we can directly observe.Few who are, or aspire to be, caseworkers, therapists or counselors come to this book innocent of all the ideas contained herein. Much will seem familiar from previous training and from experiences with people. Moreover, many Freudian terms have been adopted into the working vocabularies of all educated people. Words like instinctual drive, defense mechanism, anxiety, guilt, conflict, unconscious, and the like, are used all the time in estimating each other. One task of Integrated Ego Psychology is defining such terms with precise meanings, as well as showing the logical connections among them.Psychoanalytic theory has envolved for about a century, and some "grand simplicities" have finally emerged. This book, for practitioners, indicates the need for a theory to guide work if we are to help people effectively. The theory must be elaborate enough to cover a very wide range of human activity and it must meet certain other standards as well.

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Psychoanalytic Ego Psychology in Clinical Work

Ego psychology is the aspect of psychoanalytic theory concerned with how people adapt to the demands and possibilities of their worlds in accordance with their inner requirements. All substantial theories of personality refer to adaptation, but there are several features special to ego psychology. It offers by far the most elaborate picture of the adaptive apparatus and of the varied devices humans have for negotiating among their drives and their life situations. More than any other theory of psychology, it emphasizes the complicated transactions that go on in people’s minds, of which many are outside conscious awareness. Ego psychology lays bare how much the adaptation is to oneself. Indeed, it shows how large a share of present mental activity has to be devoted to dealing with marks left on the person from past efforts at adaptation.

Few who are, or aspire to be, caseworkers, therapists, or counselors will come to this book innocent of all the ideas contained herein. Much will seem familiar from previous training and from experiences with people. The “ego,” after all, is the part of the client’s personality that the practitioner most immediately confronts. Moreover, many Freudian terms have been adopted into the working vocabularies of all educated people. Words such as instinctual drive, defense mechanism, anxiety, guilt, conflict, and unconscious are used all the time in estimating each other. One task of this book, therefore, will be to lend such terms precise meanings; another will be to show the logical connections among them. When the ambition is not simply to discuss the patient but to help him, precision in expression and thought becomes essential. Amorphous theories of treatment will not do.

Psychoanalytic theory has been evolving for over a century. Some grand simplicities have finally emerged. Hence, a further aim of the book is to show how modern ego psychology fits clients’ seemingly unrelated behaviors and moods into understandable patterns. The newcomer will find Freudian conceptions unsettling, surprising, and rewarding. To believe you can make sense of people’s doings is a high intellectual pleasure. And there is more.

Theory Is Practical

Fortunately for their students, most potential clinicians are far more interested in helping people than in playing with abstractions. Yet in the phrasing of the late Kurt Lewin, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” (Marrow 1969; Polansky 1986). How is a theory practical? How can you determine if the theory you are learning is a good one?

The chief benefit of practice guided by theory is that it saves energy. Suppose you have an interview with someone you have never met. How do you open yourself to impressions without being swamped with information? To be sure, the client’s expression seems more important than the color of his eyes; his mood more important than his hat size. But does it matter more that he was in a fight last night or that he talks about it in such a flat and toneless voice? Adlai Stevenson remarked that the American press separates the wheat from the chaff, and publishes the chaff. Your personality theory helps you discriminate behavioral chaff. You attend to those things that matter most in making your diagnosis. As we shall later see, attention energy is a very expensive form of mental energy, indeed. The number of things you can attend to is limited.

Theory also mobilizes energy. A protective service worker had to deal with a poor woman who had a history of mental illness. She had previously had three children removed by court order. Now she had another baby by an alcoholic husband who was found wheeling the baby in a carriage down the highway. The baby was about the only thing the mother had in this world and the baby was in danger. Who can take action against so pitiable a woman without assurance that the course being followed is the right one? Who can confront the person denying her alcoholism and strip away her pretenses without the knowledge that it will ultimately benefit her? Practice based on theory helps the worker bear the painful duty of inflicting necessary hurt.

A person whose practice is based on a credible theory is likely to be more persuasive. Conviction communicates; so does its lack. Fritz Redl (1942) wrote of the “dominance of the unconflicted personality constellation over the conflicted.” In the exercise of interpersonal influence, those who think they know what they are doing have an advantage over those who vacillate even if what they think they know is actually inaccurate.

Theory in clinical practice also mobilizes social energy. Helping someone often requires coordinating efforts of several people. Thus a case of child neglect may involve a protective services worker, an eligibility worker, a homemaker, a nursery school teacher, a pediatrician. How are they to keep from acting at cross purposes? If all are trained in the same theory, teamwork will flow. But where there is no theory, coordination depends on who has the most power or personal magnetism. Such hierarchical arrangements do not encourage growth among those in subsidiary roles. Moreover, if the leader is not available, any unexpected event leaves the others at a loss about what to do. A common theory provides the framework for a shared treatment plan. But possession of a common theory means those involved had to submit themselves to a period of discipline while acquiring it.

Theory Protects the Client

In talking treatments, a major issue separates the craftsmen from the hacks. Does the worker accept that she/he is subject to impulses that can interfere with treatment, which may even be destructive? A worker brought this problem to group supervision. He has been treating a young woman who had tried to use seductiveness to take control of the treatment. Now the worker finds himself starting to respond. He asks: “What content are we approaching that leads me to want to join her in distracting the treatment?” It is too early in this book to speculate about the answer to his question, but not too early to appreciate the fact that he asked it. To keep his therapeutic wits about him, the worker had to be able to feel himself reacting to the client’s provocativeness—and at the same time to observe himself responding. Commitment to a body of theory experienced as larger than one’s own knowledge strengthens the self-observing process in the worker.

If a client is ruining her life for reasons she cannot bear to recognize, her only hope is that the worker will not join in her blindness. Remember that a large proportion of those we try to help are locked into selfdestructive schemes—the insecure adolescent flaunting his machismo by dangerous stunts on his motorcycle; the girl who flees an incestuous situation at home by escaping into the streets; the elderly widower unwilling to make the compromises by which he might bring new warmth into his barren life. In each instance, it might seem obvious to any bystander that the course being chosen by the client is self-defeating. In fact, we suspect that the client knows this somewhere, too. Yet they persist.

Those who came into our field long before us were rarely geniuses, but they could observe. They learned the hard way that preaching, exhorting, logical reasoning, and detailed explanations often failed. It was as if these approaches assumed more reasonableness and more self-awareness than was usually found among such clients. There was an obvious need for a better theory, one that would make sense out of otherwise senseless behavior.

Marks of a Good Theory

Following Lewin’s famous dictum, we noted ways in which working from a good theory is eminently practical. It conserves and mobilizes treatment energy and acts to protect our clients. But how to determine whether a particular theory is a “good” one? Here are some criteria for judging theories of personality at which I have arrived over the years.

First, good theory is dynamic. “Ah,” you say. “Thanks for telling me water’s wet.” Dynamic is one of those valued words. What does it mean in this connection? Just the advance in mode of thought from Aristotle to Galileo.

The form of theory widely taught when I was young was mostly classificatory. Thus there were four kinds of schizophrenics. There were also tramps, hoboes, and migrants. There were three male body types: ectomorphs, endomorphs, and mesomorphs—skinny, fat, muscular. One could spend hours debating the group into which one’s client best fit. But then what? What did the classification tell you? Not much, really. A dynamic theory, on the other hand, deals with regularities among events. When a hungry dog is presented with food, it will salivate. If an idea is too shocking, a person is apt to repress it. Dynamic theory is phrased as sets of predictions of what will happen. How does that help? Well, if one can introduce the cause of something, the effect will follow. This is important when our job consists of encouraging the desirable and preventing the undesirable from happening.

Scant wonder that among scientists the most trusted test of the validity of a theory is its success in predicting. Prediction goes to the heart of how theory is used. It is the intellectual ability to predict that gives us some control over our clients’ fates. So we need a dynamic theory, one that passes the test of prediction.

Second, a good theory simplifies your life. When you have to memorize all the concepts and laws making up a body of theory, this criterion may sound unbelievable. But, in the long run, it should be true. Take a simple example from physics. Newton, struck on the head by a falling apple, observed that all objects fall to the ground, and suspected a general force was at work. Galileo suspended two weights side by side and noted that they moved a tiny bit toward each other. In other words, all masses attract each other, and the falling apple is but one example of the general attraction we call gravity. Which proved to be the reason astronauts do not fall off the moon! A good theory is able to cover the largest range of specific observations with the fewest possible principles. The rule of parsimony is very important to serious theoreticians, for it urges them to be stingy about adding concepts and propositions. Never add a new law if the data can be understood with an already existing one.

Let me take another example from some of our own work (Polansky et al., 1981). We were studying neglectful mothers, and comparing them with mothers in similar life circumstances who were not neglectful. What did we observe? More of the neglectful women seemed vulnerable to exploitation by the men in their lives; they had more babies, they proved to be more passive and disorganized, and they reported themselves less embedded in helping networks. What underlying force could account for these seemingly disparate observations? Perhaps they all had to do with a fundamental loneliness in these mothers’ lives. And, indeed, when loneliness was directly measured it proved to differentiate the neglectful from nonneglectful mothers studied. Loneliness was an effect of personality traits associated with neglect and, in turn, contributed to the disorganization causing neglect (Polansky 1985).

Good theories, then, are concise. They are easy to hold in mind. This is very important when you are trying to keep your wits about you while dealing with a marital squabble. Good theories call to mind the saying, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember the details.” By the same token, good theories permit you to live in one world: They apply to your dealings with clients, they apply to your dealings with other people, and they apply to you. Indeed, the fact that ego psychology is directly applicable to one’s own mental processes is probably the greatest stumbling block to learning it.

The conciseness of good theory is achieved by following the rule of parsimony. How shall our theory be formulated and stated so as to cover the largest number of events with the least number of principles? Later in the book we shall describe formulations advanced by various theoreticians. When several cover closely related clinical phenomena, there is the obvious question, “Whose theory ought we adopt?” Choice is easy when one theory is valid and another has a poor ability to predict. But how about cases in which two formulations seem equally valid? Then the issue, sometimes left unspoken by seniors in the field, is this: “Whose theory promises to be more parsimonious for the field in the long run?” That kind of forecasting may be very difficult, even impossible. For the time being there may be no better course than to study both theories and wait for further advances.

The fetching generality of a brilliant theoretical formulation is, then, a great convenience to the lazy, provided they deal comfortably with abstractions. But it opens few doors for the concrete minded. This seems unfair until we realize that a good theory must hit the right level of abstractness.

Statements may be true, profound, general, and useless. Once, I was asked to consult on a research project by a woman I very much liked. I was delighted, for she was powerful, prestigious, and skilled at raising funds. “What would you like to study?” “I have an idea.” “Tell me.” “I think people are basically loving.” Similar statements that come to mind are: “All men are mortal” and “You must begin where the client is.” Freud’s notions of a Death Instinct and a Life Instinct seem to many of us to suffer from similar irrelevance. So, one sign of whether a theory may be too general to be helpful may be whether it might be wrong. Theories that are irrefutable usually turn out to have to do with logical definitions rather than natural events.

Another mark of a good theory, in our field at least, is that it is not obvious. Once, I argued with an old friend, Leon Festinger, about a theory he was advancing. “Leon,” I said, “This does not fit common sense.” “Oh,” he retorted, “Common sense is boring. What I like is a theory that makes predictions contrary to common sense that turn out to be true.” Which he did, and they did (Festinger 1964). It takes a nonobvious theory to explain why comforting a depressed person may deepen his sadness or why an antidepressant drug might resolve a manic episode. It takes a nonobvious theory to understand that, as we used to say, “A sadist is someone who is kind to masochists.” A major attraction of ego psychology is its ability to deal with seeming paradoxes. The nonobviousness of a valid theory is often a sign that it is parsimonious. In any event, it should be possible, in the course of earning one’s degree, to learn things about human nature you did not already know in high school.

Although we have reiterated the desirability of parsimony, it is not the same as condensation. In assessing a body of theory, for example the Freudian, one also looks for adequate comprehensiveness. Does the theory cover enough of the matters that need to be taken into account? Intuitively, we would be inclined to mistrust theories that prescribe the same treatment for all comers. Separating clients or patients into groups that require differing modes of treatment may mean we take into account features beyond motivation. As we shall see, there are practice theories that do not recognize that many clients have fixed limitations. Instead, they presume that everyone we see will be physically healthy, of normal intelligence or better, and in good contact with reality. Theories that do not take into view deficits in clients’ abilities and life chances hardly help us to help those who may be most in need. They remind me of what one of my mentors, Fritz Redl, would say when I rushed in with still another grand summation. “This theory is an insult to the complexity of nature.”

Why the Choice of Psychoanalytic Theory?

Social work has been involved with the psychoanalytic theory of personality for over half a century. My participation during much of this affair between the disciplines provides an opportunity to review its true history. According to one version, several outstanding teachers underwent personal analyses in the 1920’s and 1930’s and proceeded to act out their unresolved feelings toward their analysts by preaching psychoanalytic theory to other social workers. Under the impact of the theory, social work lost sight of the role that circumstance plays in our lives, and came to assume that clients’ troubles all stemmed from within. It took a major upheaval in the 1960’s to “put the social back into social work” and free it from bondage.

The image has some basis in fact but is terribly overstated (Alexander 1972; Hamilton 1958). In the first place, the 1930’s were the years of the Great Depression, which did not relent until we began mobilizing for World War II. Along with their other troubles, most people we saw were very poor. The hunger and suffering were staggering. One fellow student went to see an elderly woman to offer her agency help since neighbors had reported she was starving. The woman refused to discuss her needs, she “could not accept c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Psychoanalytic Ego Psychology in Clinical Work
• 2 Basic Freudian Conceptions
• 3 Symptom and Defense
• 4 Sources of Resiliency
• 5 Character As Personality Structure
• 6 Contemporary Characterology
• 7 Development of the Ego
• 8 The Theory of Object Relations
• 9 The Pursuit and Dread of Love
• 10 On Duplicity in the Interview
• 11 Ego Functions in Psychodrama
• 12 The Healing Powers of Speech
• 13 Group Psychology
• 14 Ego-Oriented Treatment
• 15 Will, Choice, and Responsibility
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index