ABSTRACT
Ego psychology used a theoretical artifact to mark the course of adaptation to the environment, which from the very beginning was defined as social, the world of the respective person, and also measured the degree of adaptation achieved. On the one side, mechanisms become clear that assure an automatic adaptation to certain social demands and forces, and that bestow a relative stability to the ego. The stabilizing function of those mechanisms may affect both the good, healthy, normal characteristics of the ego and the restricted pathological ones. If communities or groups exist in a social situation where mutual fraternal or sisterly identifications are possible because of these groups’s special structure or the special psychology of their members, the group ego guarantees good social adaptation. This adaptive mechanism reflects the common structure of the society more accurately than others. The most impressive adaptation to the demand of the social environment is, no doubt, the construction of the superego.
