ABSTRACT
The ego is the term psychoanalysis uses to categorize and describe mental processes that regulate and mediate between the experience of reality and the experience of emotions. This chapter discusses those mediating and regulating ego functions, experiences, and organizations of experiences that are particularly relevant to understanding psychotic and near psychotic illnesses. Heinz Hartmann's ego psychology divides ego functions not by reality experience and emotional experience but into autonomous ego functions or apparatuses, primary or secondary, and defensive functions. The chapter describes ego functions relevant to psychotic and near psychotic structure. It focuses on the aspects of primary process important in psychotic and near psychotic organization and experience. The ego should be able to set some boundaries in consciousness to conceptual experience so that it can remain an integration mode of abstract thinking, and not be interchangeable with or flooded by affect or percept.
