ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies and describes an American independent tradition within American psychoanalysis, intersubjective ego psychology, whose founding theoretical, clinical, and developmental thinkers are Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson. This newly defined tradition draws from and synthesizes two historically antagonistic traditions that constituted classical American psychoanalysis, the ego psychology of Heinz Hartmann and Anna Freud, and the interpersonal psychoanalysis of Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, and Clara Thompson. It is akin to the British independent tradition, or British Middle Group, in that tradition’s incorporation of and movement beyond Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Intersubjective ego psychology remains firmly committed to ego psychological understandings and technique while also theorizing, without coming to identify as either interpersonal or relational, the centrality and pervasive impact of the object-relational, developmental, and analytic transference-countertransference fields. It remains open to and curious about social and cultural influences in the psyche. As a sociocultural study, the chapter explores what makes American psychoanalysis American. Although defining, rather than simply describing, what is characteristically American is itself problematic and can be done only with self-conscious irony, the chapter provides an historical overview of psychoanalytic controversies in the United States. It also considers schematically the relations between “American” and “European” psychoanalysis.
