Introduction:
 Many people who studied with Freud and his followers, while
endorsing many aspects of psychoanalytic theory, could not accept that all
of our strivings to create and to achieve and to understand arise from the
sublimation of id energies. They believed the ego must have other sources of
energy and motivation. For example, Alfred Adler suggested that the
strivings of the ego are actually efforts to compensate for feelings of
inferiority. Karen Horney suggested that many of our strivings are efforts
to cope with the basic anxiety we feel about alone and helpless in a vast
and sometimes hostile world. Heinz Hartmann suggested that much of the time
the ego is not coping with any unresolved internal concerns—whether from the
id or elsewhere—but is simply trying to adapt to the world. Adler, Horney,
Hartmann, and others who shifted the focus of psychoanalytic thinking from
the id and unconscious conflicts to the ego and the process of adapting to
real-world challenges have come to be known as the Ego Psychologists. We
will examine their approach in more detail in this next section.
|
|
