ABSTRACT
Drawing on the ego psychological work of Anna Freud, and on her historical opposition to the theories of Melanie Klein, the American group nonetheless developed an idea similar to that of the British school, that the mind of the psychotic person is split into normal and psychotic parts. In the American iteration the normal or neurotic individual has a strong ego and is capable of resolving intrapsychic conflict by repression, and of controlling the drives that would otherwise lead to psychotic loss of boundaries and fragmentation. The psychotic person, by contrast, has a weak ego, is unable to repress, and hence is prone to regression and unable to attain and sustain a normal/neurotic organization.
In his work on borderline personality organization Otto Kernberg succeeded in bringing about a rapprochement between the European Kleinian and American ego psychology iterations of Freud’s second model of the split mind. He defined a stable psychotic personality organization, and amalgamated the conceptual language of structural ego psychology with that of Klein and her paranoid-schizoid position, splitting, and projective identification. In so doing he unwittingly introduced Klein’s ideas to the North American psychoanalytic community.
