ABSTRACT
When Loevinger began her work on ego development, psychoanalysis was a very different discipline. In contrast to its contemporary pluralistic state (Wallerstein, 1988), psychoanalysis was a somewhat monolithic, authoritarian guild, where dissent was cause for excommunication, particularly if that dissent questioned the centrality of Freud’s theory of psychosexual development. Many analysts were ardently antiempirical, for a number of reasons. The one good reason was that empirical data too seldom had a fraction of the depth of clinical data. The other reasons were less commendable. For one, data challenge hierarchy, and the institutes were organized in a hierarchical fashion in which gray-haired, bearded men were the keepers of the faith and the ultimate arbiters of what was or was not “analytic”—which was too often confused with what was or was not true. To the extent that psychoanalysis had an epistemology, it was a somewhat medieval epistemology of authority. To make a new theoretical argument, an analytic author had to show that Freud had already said the same thing in some footnote, so that the potential heretic was really just explicating-—literally making explicit—what was in the Standard Edition. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that Loevinger has had little, if any, impact on psychoanalysis, much like Bowlby and, to a lesser degree, Erikson (who is rarely cited in psychoanalytic journals).
