From psychoanalytic ego psychology to relational psychoanalysis, a historical and clinical perspective

In July 2019 one of us (M.C.) published a book with the title Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion, and the multiple voices of international psychoanalysis, in which he connected the clinical approach of those authors and their psychoanalytic perspective to their most important life experiences and to the scientific and interpersonal contexts in which their contributions developed, including the main partners accompanying their professional evolution. He thus tried to demonstrate not only the importance of the history of psychoanalysis for the practicing clinician, but also its relevance as a key to the pluralistic and international character of contemporary psychoanalysis. In the fall of 2018, M.C. had been contacted by Eva Papiasvili (New York) and Arne Jemstedt (Stockholm), who invited him to collaborate on the preparation of the item “Ego psychology” for the Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (IRED). The IRED was originally conceived by Stefano Bolognini at the time of his IPA presidency (2013–2017), and is published online by the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). The task that M.C. readily accepted was to contribute to the revisitation of the development of ego psychology in Europe, the reconstruction of its development in North and South America being the task of the other two regional teams, with Arne Jemstedt coordinating the European team, and Eva Papiasvili coordinating the whole work. Fascinated by such a research project and determined to do his best, M.C. came to the following two discoveries. In the first place, ego psychology had been alive and well in Europe – and not only in North America – both before and after World War II. Important ego psychologists after the war were, for example, Alexander Mitscherlich (1908–1982) and Paul Parin (1916–2009), who both emphasized its critical potential – which they considered to have been lost in the North American emigration. Also ego-psychologically based is the German Kassensystem, that is, in the way in which a clinical report has to be written so that the treatment will be paid by the Kassen – the German Social Security System. The nature of the most important German analytic concept, that is, the concepts of “szenisches Verstehen” and “szenische Funktion des Ich” – scenic understanding and scenic function of the ego – is ego-psychological as well. Second, M.C. came to realize that the line of thought he was articulating in the book he was then writing (see above) was in fact also applicable to ego psychology. In other words, we have almost as many approaches to ego psychology as we have pioneers dealing with it, according to their personalities and priorities. Some examples include the following: Heinz Hartmann, whose priority was the ego as the center of a new general psychology; Otto Fenichel, before him, who looked at ego psychology as the best way to formulate the analytic technique he used with his patients; Paul Federn, who developed his own ego psychology in order to better understand and work with severely disturbed patients; and, last but not least, Anna Freud, who saw Freud’s structural model as the best way to keep track of the child’s psychological development. At this point, M.C. contributed the first result of his historical research to the final elaboration of the item “Ego psychology” of the IRED, which was put online in December 2020, and he then kept working on the second perspective on his own. Over the course of 2021, with the help of Paolo Migone (Parma), he was able to further develop this perspective to the point of trying to distinguish what he called Hartmann’s ego psychology (EP) from the abovementioned branches of what he called “psychoanalytic ego psychology” (Pep), as he was able to do in the article he published in 2021 in Italian in the journal Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane. In other words, just as we have learned to speak of “object relations theories” in the plural, so we could profit from doing the same with ego psychology, and talk in terms of the different “ego psychologies.” After discussing this point of view with the editorial board of this journal in the spring of 2022,