ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 by Eric R. Marcus traces the development of the ego concept from 1923 up to the present and offers future directions. The ego as synthesizer and creator is described (i.e., its role in symbolic representation as the basic building block: to object relations, to relationships, to personality, to enactment, to psychic reality, to meaning, and to self and its story). The potential of modern ego psychology is a meta-theory of psychoanalysis as a general psychology. Metapsychologies describe different ego organizations of different affect validated organizations of symbolic representation. Metapsychologies are different aspects of a general psychology of the human mind.
