Egosyntonic and Egodystonic - The Freudian Heritage

The Freudian Heritage

"Ego syntonic" was a taken-for-granted aspect of Freud's conceptual armoury, as in his formulation of 'the aim of psychoanalytic therapy, which is "to replace repressions which are insecure by reliable ego-syntonic controls"'. He saw psychic conflict arising when 'the original lagging instincts...come into conflict with the ego (or ego-syntonic instincts)'.

His daughter, Anna Freud, would point out that 'the defences are harder to get at than the impulses, because...defenses against them are familiar, comfortable, unobjectionable, "ego-syntonic" ways of being, and are thus difficult to see as transference rather than as "real"'.

Otto Fenichel's grand summary of the first psychoanalytic half-century 'differentiated sharply between ego-syntonic morbid impulses and the ego-alien symptoms of compulsion neurotics'. He saw 'impulsive actions, which are ego syntonic' as driven by 'the ego-syntonic impulses'; and conversely regarded neurotic symptoms 'as both painful and ego alien' - while still recognising the possibility of 'a reaction formation against a symptom, namely, the denial of the ego-dystonic character of the symptom'.

Later writers, exploring the gradual emergence of unconscious material, would note how 'the direct, unmitigated expression of a repressed semantic element would be highly "ego-dystonic", and it is considered more "ego-syntonic" for the repressed element to be only indirectly expressed'.