Transcript of Audio Lecture
This lesson will explore the perspective that has come
to be known as ego-psychology and in particular the writings of Alfred
Adler, Karen Horney and Heinz Hartmann.
Slide two. The ego psychologists were individuals who
were influenced by Freud, indeed a number of them studied directly with
Freud, but who came to disagree with some central tenets of
psychoanalytic approach. In particular, they did not believe that all
ego activity could run on transmuted Id energy. Recall that the
traditional psychoanalytic view is that a frustrated ID is the source of
all of psychic energy; so even the energy you’re using right now to
listen to this particular lesson ultimately derives from id
frustrations. The ego-psychologists found this to be untenable and
suggested instead that the ego must have its own sources of energy.
Slide three. For Alfred Adler, that source of energy
for the ego was a basic sense of inferiority. While growing up everybody
repeatedly experiences being inferior to others. The first time you do
anything, you do it more poorly than others are doing it. As a very
young child first learning to crawl or stand or walk, you are surrounded
by people for whom these are mindlessly easy tasks, yet for you they are
extremely difficult. Later, as you trying to use a spoon or a fork,
utensils that others around you are using without thinking, and you are
repeatedly dumping your food on your bib or your nose, you can again
feel inferior. So nobody escapes childhood without a basic sense of
inferiority; the question is how you deal with it. According to Adler,
your personality or what he called your lifestyle is your way of
responding to basic feelings of inferiority.
Slide four. According to Adler, we can group people’s
ways of compensating for inferiority into three basic categories. One is
to overcompensate for those feelings and to develop what he calls a
superiority complex. In this case, in order to not feel those unpleasant
feelings of inferiority, you seek to feel the opposite—superiority—by
dominating others, putting others down, aggressing against others. You
try to make yourself feel big by making others feel small. In short,
you’re a bully. A second way of coping with inferiority is to give up,
developing what Adler calls an inferiority complex. You simply accept
the fact that you’re inferior, that you do things poorly, so either
withdraw from the challenges of life or depend on others to make the
difficult decisions and do the difficult tasks for you because at heart
you still feel yourself to be that small and helpless child. The third
way and the one that Adler encouraged people to use is to strive for
superiority, but in meaningful and pro-social ways; that is to do the
best you can in the domains of love and work. Guided by this view, Adler
developed a much more practical form of therapy than Freud had
developed. Oftentimes Adler’s intervention with people was to help them
to "get a life". He felt that if people had ways to engage in the world
and make positive contributions, much of their pathology would go away.
Slide five. Another important ego-psychologist was
Karen Horney and you’ll see some overlaps in the models that Adler and
Horney proposed despite the fact that they were working independently.
Whereas Adler suggested that the source of energy for the ego—that is,
the source independent of the id-- was a feeling of inferiority, Horney
suggested it was basic anxiety, a concept with more existential depth.
It was a sense of anxiety arising from feeling helpless and abandoned in
a vast and uncaring universe. Infants and children will repeatedly
discover, to their dismay, that the world is so much bigger than just
their caregivers; moreover, unlike their caregiver, the world for the
most part does not care for them or about them; and even their caregiver
is imperfect and uncaring at times. As it becomes clearer that they are
just a tiny speck in a vast and uncaring cosmos, they experience
anxiety. According to Horney there are different ways in which the ego
copes with this basic anxiety. We all use all three, but sometimes
people will become overly reliant on a particular coping mechanism and
when it gets used too much or too rigidly, the coping mechanism becomes
what Horney calls a neurotic need.
Slide six. According to Horney there are three basic
styles or types of neurotic needs. One is moving towards others. Here to
cope with a sense of being insignificant and helpless, you move towards
others--for protection, for affection, for approval. This reminds me of
Adler’s dependent type of inferiority complex. A second neurotic need is
moving against others, coping with feeling small by looking big, by
seeking power, superiority, dominance; this reminds me of Adler’s
superiority complex. A third neurotic need is moving away from others.
To avoid confronting one’s own inadequacy and insignificance, you live
an isolated, unassailable, even invisible life. You’d immerse yourself
in routines where you feel safe and in control and shut away from
anxiety-producing existential realities. This reminds me of the
withdrawing version of Adler’s inferiority complex.
Slide seven. While Adler and Horney suggest the ego
has sources of energy that arise not from the ID, but from dealing with
the outside, the ego is still defending against anxieties and
insecurities, and those defenses (against insecurity and basic anxiety)
are what motivate the ego. Other ego-psychologists moved even further
away from the Freudian notion that conflict and anxiety were the source
of psychic energy. Hartmann in particular suggested that there was both
a conflict sphere of ego functioning and a conflict free sphere. The
conflict sphere of ego functioning is that sphere where the ego is
coping with the id and superego. So, Hartmann agreed with Freud that the
ego does have to deal with the id and superego. However, Hartmann
further suggested that there was a conflict free sphere of ego
functioning that was in fact more important sphere and in this sphere
the ego draws on autonomous sources of energy dedicated to adapting to
life’s challenges. This conception of the ego as outwardly focused and
adapting to life is really the main focus of the ego psychologists and
the neoanalytic perspectives in general.
Slide eight. There are two sources of autonomy for the
ego in this view. One is primary ego autonomy, sources of energy for the
ego that are innate and intrinsic. According to the ego-psychologist
Robert White, two such sources of primary ego autonomy are effectance
motivation and competence motivation. In contrast to the more basic
biological drives that were the purview of the id, effectance motivation
is simply a motive to have an effect. If you watch a baby in the crib,
you may come to agree with Robert White that this really is an innate
drive. Babies enjoy simply having an effect. If they kick their leg and
make something jingle or make something go bump, it gives them pleasure,
they get a delighted look on their face, and they do it again and again
and again. The behavior doesn’t has no meaning or purpose other than to
have an effect; having the effect in and of itself seems to be
intrinsically rewarding. Now over time, simply having an effect gets
less motivating, and people seek not only to have an effect but to be
effective and this is what we mean by competence motivation. And you
find that once babies become toddlers and have more motor control, they
get interested in using their new skills, in pushing the envelope.
First, walking; then running, skipping, jumping, climbing; they keep
testing their competence and so expanding their competence. They may
start by getting enjoyment out of knocking over towers of blocks. But
over time they get more interested in building up those towers and
showing that they can build them taller, and stronger, and in more
interesting ways. That’s competence motivation, the motivation to do
something well, to be effective.
Some more recent constructs that are
similar and that have had a great impact especially on the educational
psychology literature include intrinsic motivation and optimal levels of
stimulation. You should recall the concept of optimal stimulation from
our discussion of biological models of introversion and extroversion,
where we found that everybody has an optimal level of stimulation (too
little you feel bored and restless, too much you feel overwhelmed and
panic stricken, but in between boredom and anxiety there’s feelings of
interest and challenge). If the human cortex is innately designed to
experience an optimal level of stimulation, it means that competence
motivation is innate, in that people find it intrinsically satisfying to
be in a state of interest and challenge, and as something becomes easy
for them, it becomes less interesting and challenging. Consequently, to
maintain that optimal level of stimulation, people keep wanting to push
the envelope and, in so doing, people keep expanding their competence.
So the ego does have primary ego autonomy: intrinsic motivations to have
effects and to be effective that are independent of the id or any other
conflict- or anxiety-based sources of energy.
A second source of ego
autonomy is secondary ego autonomy, sometimes called functional autonomy
and here the behavior has become uncoupled from the original motivation.
So, even if a behavior was initially motivated directly or indirectly by
ID impulses, over time it can come to have a very different source of
motivation. For example imagine that a four or five year old boy is in
the midst of the oedipal conflict and sees dad as a rival and wants
mom’s attention all to himself. He knows that his mother loves to cook
and if he stands beside his mother in the kitchen and helps her cook,
then he can have her exclusive attention and enjoy the contact and the
warmth of being beside her as they’re working. So initially it’s an
oedipal desire, but it just so happens that he comes to enjoy cooking.
Over time he gets rewarded for cooking by no just mom, but other family
members, and eventually people outside the family, and so as he enters
adulthood he decides to become a chef as his profession. It brings him
money and fame and a sense of competence, so as an adult cooking has no
longer anything to do with oedipal conflicts. Yes, it might have started
out there, but it ended up being motivated by other sources of
motivation that were ego-based or reality-based.
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