The Past and Future of Ego Psychology

Having six roots in ordinary observation and introspection, ego psychology has a long pre-Freudian history, which influenced Freud's first usages of Ich. His works before 1923 contain much that is substantively ego psychology; The Ego and the Id was not a paradigm change but a consolidation of pre-existing ideas. The structural theory replaced a model (topographic) which Freud actually used very little, especially clinically, and he failed to remedy its gravest methodological faults. The ego-id model is an integral part of metapsychology, and will pass out of use as the latter dies, with no detriment to clinical psychoanalysis.