Abstract
Morris Eagle has written a foundational text laying out the basis of a modern ego psychology for an integrated general psychoanalytic psychology of the mind. It is a big book: big in ideas, big in scope, big in scholarship, big in accomplishment. Eagle is a thought leader among thought leaders. His seminal book brings us an academic-psychological, scientifically objective approach to psychoanalytic clinical variables of mental function. Further, Eagle explains how this approach can provide a firm foundation for psychoanalytic theory.
Modern ego psychology is a growing interest area for a group of psychoanalysts (Marcus 1999, in press). We are devoted to the task of developing a badly needed, unifying theory. This requires a general psychology encompassing all aspects of mind: the biological, the developmental, the interpersonal and relational, the structural, and the subjective. Freud started his work with this general psychology project in mind. Eagle, a leader in this area for decades, now explores and summarizes the current status of ego psychological theory, claiming its place as the foundation of a modern, psychoanalytic general psychology.
Eagle contends that ego psychology, broadly described, provides the basis for a general psychology, along with certain amendments and expansions. Many of these are already accepted in psychoanalytic theory broadly, but are in need of clarification and specification. Eagle selects central topics. He reviews studies from academic psychology that bear on the topics he discusses and that ground his theory.
Anyone who wishes to expand theory must deal with barriers to growth within the theory itself. Eagle sees this as a process of necessary corrections and revisions. He takes on the big issues that ego psychology faces if it is to become a modern theory of the mind. He thus prepares the way for ego psychology to usefully integrate all theories. He does so in a brilliant and scholarly way. What are some of those big issues and what does Eagle have to say about them?
Conscious / unconscious
Eagle takes on the subtle prejudice that only the unconscious counts, that manifest content is only obfuscating. This allows the secondary process and the conscious mind, more of human experience, to enter into the general psychology of psychoanalysis. It also allows the elaboration of the mental mechanisms involved in Hartmann's idea of adaptation (1939). Adaptation means inner change in response to the environment, not only in the form of defenses and compromises, but also in the ego’s relationship to reality, both physical and social.
Drive
For psychoanalysis to be a modern psychology, two problems with the drive concept must be engaged. The first is the issue of instinct. The second is the issue of motivation. Eagle understands Freud’s distinction between instinct and drive, often presented as a difference without a distinction in later elaborations of drive theory. Instinct is about the brain and neurobiology. Drive is about the mind and psychology. Instinct is inborn and stereotyped. Drive is malleable and adaptive. Regulation and discharge concern instinct, not drive. Eagle understands that the mind is about more than just discharge.
Second is the issue of drive motivation beyond the sexual. Eagle notes that Freud himself said the affectionate current is older than the sexual current. This statement validates the concept of the drive as object seeking, and the work of Fairbairn (1952), who held that object seeking is primary. For human beings, feeding for survival requires attachment to a feeding object. It was Winnicott (1965) who famously said there is no baby without a mother. He meant this both biologically and psychologically.
Freud’s idea that drives seek objects was further elaborated by Sullivan (1953) and by a number of relationalists and interpersonalists. Eagle correctly says that a focus on the affectionate current allowed for an understanding of the growth and development of object relations. The concept of a drive seeking an object links Freud’s theories to adaptation and survival.
The mind adapts to its ecology, both to the ecology of interpersonal reality and to its own emotional reactions. Hartmann announced this aspect of mental function, but was given little credit for doing so, and—even when credited—was often denigrated. But the concept of adaptation, basic to any modern understanding of mind, is supported not only by psychoanalytic observations but by research observations and experiments ranging from Harlow and Harlow (1969) to Stern (1985).
Ego
Eagle reviews various ego psychology approaches and their problems, which have led to the fading of ego psychology as the dominant paradigm in America. Eagle aims to advance into its next developmental phase—one of synthesis including not only ego psychology but all of psychoanalytic theory. Toward this end, he clearly addresses problems in older versions of ego psychology. He shows what inspired the growth of other theories and the problems they were intended to address. One gets a wonderful overview of the development of theory qua theory and its vicissitudes: its growth and development, its advances and retreats, its theses, antitheses, and syntheses. This alone is worth the price of the book.
Eagle understands that if modern ego psychology is to be a general psychology of the mind, the concept of the ego must be enlarged to include more than defenses and autonomous ego functions. It must include more than the regulation of the drives and their adaptive use in reality. It must include a broad theory of motivation.
In a careful, scholarly chapter, Eagle describes the complicated history of the ego concept in Freudian theory and shows how it can be enlarged to include the ego’s motivations and adaptations, not just the drives. When the ego has its own motivations, it becomes more than a set of mechanical processes. Motive is the term used for the broader concept of motivation. Motive involves agencies other than the id. It involves combinations of all mental agencies.
Eagle points out that the ego regulates object relations and interpersonal relationships. He notes that ego development itself occurs in the context of the growth and development of object relations. This is a virtuous cycle of bidirectional causality, with each process reinforcing the other. The growth and development of the ego and its functions and the growth and development of object relations go hand in hand. Ego psychology supported tremendous advances in our understanding of child development, from Anna Freud on, and—in turn—in our general understanding of emotional development (now seen as broader than drive development).
Affect
Freud saw affect as a drive derivative. This reduces the essence of qualitative representation to instinctual drive discharge, applicable perhaps to animals but not to humans. Eagle’s chapter on affect is about affect regulation—an ego function—and its relation to attachment. He shows how the role of affect in maintaining attachment factors into psychoanalytic theory from Fairbairn (1952) to Sullivan (1953) to Kernberg (1976), and by implication to all object-relational, relational/interpersonal, and intersubjective theories. Crucially, Eagle integrates affect into ego psychology, showing where it fits comfortably into ego psychological theory. It is the ego that organizes and synthesizes affect experiences.
Conflict and compromise
Brenner (1982) thought that psychoanalysis was only about conflict and compromise. He understood conflict as if it could be represented by a set of vectors, and compromise as if it were a simple sum of those vectors. He emphasized the obfuscating functions of compromise, and undervalued its creative and revelatory potentials. Thus, Brenner was as much a reductionist as the drive theorists he hoped to replace. I wish Eagle had written more about Brenner, because his influence is still associated with ego psychology, to our detriment. Although Brenner and his coworkers claimed dominance, his was—even in its time—just one metapsychology, one view of ego psychology, and one view of what the structural theory implied for the mind and for psychoanalytic theory at large. Brenner’s view enjoyed some popularity. However, it also generated stereotypes about ego psychology that inspired competing viewpoints, which eventually won the day.
Self and subjectivity
Once the meaning of ego changed from “self” to “regulatory capacity,” what happened to the self? Jacobson (1964) viewed the self as the sum of self-representations. She conceived the self as a sum of parts rather than a new integration. Eagle states very clearly that “in order for ego functions to operate, there must be a subject, an ‘I’, to carry them out, and this ‘I’ is the experiential aspect. . . .” He continues: “Our language reflects the use of ‘I’ as an agent and as the center of experience and action, and self as representation and object of reflection” (p. 262). Thus, Eagle is aware of the need for a concept of person in a modern ego psychology; accordingly, he distinguishes a “personal agent” from the self as representation.
Eagle thus summarizes what is perhaps his most important contribution to the extension and advancement of ego psychology: “the fact is that it is one’s lived experiences that make one’s life meaningful” (p. 263). Eagle sees the mind as a whole, and as a synthesis. Any theory that purports to be a general psychology of the mind requires this.
Treatment
Eagle points out that the goal of treatment is not just to uncover the infantile neurosis, but also to help the patient integrate its derivatives in adult symptoms and personality into a new synthesis. This goal of treatment links it to the synthetic functions of the ego. Eagle does not discuss specific techniques, but does point out that treatment itself involves an integration of different metapsychologies. His point is that psychoanalytic treatment requires broad understanding of psychological integration, and an effort to help patients figure out how to achieve it.
Conclusion
I learned a tremendous amount from this book. Eagle’s writing is so clear, his thinking so specific, that I expect to use this book as a teaching text for supervisions and for classes with analytic candidates and advanced psychiatry residents. This book should also be useful for graduate students in psychology and social work. A great teaching book like this one teaches both instructors and students.
This book will help catalyze the growth and development of ego psychology into a modern psychoanalytic general psychology. Eagle has achieved his goal in a remarkably interesting and thorough way, expanding and integrating concepts as needed, while anchoring them in the literature of academic psychology, so little known among most psychoanalysts. Eagle explains terms and concepts in an engagingly descriptive way, enlightening readers rather than constraining their thinking.
The book is a worthy capstone to Eagle’s illustrious career. It is a pleasure to see how far he has come with his work, and to have a grand summary statement of the progress he has made for our field. It will help all of us working in this area of an integrating modern ego psychology (see, e.g., Marcus 2018) take the next giant step toward an opening and integration that psychoanalysis needs, and that—largely thanks to Eagle—is now temptingly close.