ABSTRACT
Ego psychology was a school that originally developed in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s as a revisionist movement within Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly under the inspiration of the writings of Karen Homey. G. Murphy, L. Murphy, and G. Newcomb, in a massive synthesis of research in social psychology that adopts a predominantly developmental perspective, argue that development takes place in two important ways: the development of values, and the development of the self. Harry Stack Sullivan was the founder of a distinct strand of ego psychology, which led to the work of Jane Loevinger, among other notable psychologists. Within the tradition of ego psychology it is not so revolutionary, as it accords with S. Freud’s claim that young children think about morality in terms of reciprocal exchange. Ego psychology has continued to offer appealing general theoretical principles to account for the descriptive trends in development known to Freud and other earlier writers from informal observation.
