ABSTRACT
Ego psychology has been a way of wriggling out of some of the dogmatism of “orthodox” psychoanalysis. In the broadest terms of intellectual history it is awkward to justify an interest in ego psychology, for writers such as Carl Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler, and Rank eloquently expressed many of the same ideas that contemporaries think of as new discoveries. Many have seen in Erik Erikson’s psychology the Americanization of Sigmund Freud, and ego psychology has served as an avenue for smuggling into psychoanalysis a meliorism and hopefulness that would be hard to infer from Freud’s texts themselves. The difficulty with so much of the work that has been undertaken on the psychology of political leaders is that it is often pursued for the sake of unspoken partisan purposes. Freud inaugurated the beginnings of ego psychology around that time, although in an abstract rather than a clinical way.
