Hartmann on ego psychology

 

Heinz hartmann believed the ego included innate capacities that facilitated an individual's ability to adapt to his/her environment.  This included perception, attention, memory, concentration, motor coordination, and language.

Under normal conditions, what Hartmann called an average expectable environment, these capacities developed into ego function and had autonomy from the libidinal and aggressive drives i.e., there were not products of frustration and conflict. Hartmann recognized that conflicts were part of the human condition and certain ego functions may become conflicted by aggressive and libidinal impulses as witnessed by conversion disorders, speech impediments, eating disorders and attention-deficit disorder.

Hartmann believed psychoanalysis facilitated an individual's adaptation to his or her environment.  Hartmann claimed, however, that his aim was to understand the mutual regulation of the ego and environment rather than to promote adjustment of the ego to the environment.  Furthermore, an individual with a less-conflicted ego would be better able to actively respond to and shape rather than passively react to his or her environment.

Functions of ego

            According to Hartmann the ego has 12 functions:

·         Reality testing

·         Judgment

·         Sense of Reality

·         Regulation and Control of drives and Impulses

·         Object Relation

·         Thought Processes

·         Adaptive Regression

·         Defensive Functioning

·         Stimulus Barrier

·         Autonomous Functions

·         Mastery-Competence

·         Integrative Functioning

Knowledge of these adaptive functions of the ego has allowed psychology and psychoanalysis to harmonize better with each other because the main goal of psychoanalysis os to draw out the Id's various drives out into the consciousness, thus allowing these drives to be met directly in an effort to reduce the patient's reliance on ego defense.

Animal Notion

Hartmann stressed the notion that animals were designed to adopt to the environment. Through the process of evolution, organisms’ interaction in a "continual Reciprocal Relationship" with their surroundings.

Ego is an Organ

Hartmann believed that because the ego is man's special organ of adaptation infants are born and immediately get equipped to fit into their physical and psychological environment. 

Freud vs. Hartmann

According to Hartmann, Infants are born and immediately get equipped to fit into their environment while according to Freud; ego is the sub servant to the id and is not independent.  Unlike the Freud, Hartmann believed that “The id and the ego develop simultaneously and function independently.”

Ego development  

Hartmann argued that the ego development comes about as a result of three sets of factors

1.      Inherited ego characteristics

2.      Influenced of the instinctual drives

3.      Influenced of outer reality

Primary and Secondary autonomous ego function

Hartmann divided ego functions into primary autonomous function and Secondary autonomous function.

Primary autonomous ego function such as the cognitive function of perception, intelligence, thinking, comprehension, language, learning and the synthetic function of ego and innate, inherited ego characteristics and conflict-free sphere.

Secondary autonomous ego function as those function that were once involved in development conflict's such as oral , anal or phallic, oedipal and were free as a result of a regulation of those conflict through the process of neutralization.

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