Auxiliary ego

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In psychoanalysis, the term auxiliary ego describes a treatment technique for patients with an instability of the ego structure. The therapist makes himself available to the patient as an auxiliary ego. The therapist supports the patient by pointing out a missing ego function.

The term was coined by the psychoanalysts and psychotherapists Franz Heigl (1921–2002) and Annelise Heigl-Evers (1920–2001). It finds its way into the publication published by Heigl-Evers et al. conceived " psychoanalytical-interactional individual therapy ", which is geared towards the treatment of patients with developmental disorders such as borderline disorders.

Auxiliary ego is also a term that in the psychodrama of Jacob Levy Moreno will use. When dealing with a problem in group therapy , it describes the supporting function of selected fellow patients. (In technical terms, the auxiliary ego is a methodical function of the fellow patients in the therapeutic process.)

Explanation

If the patient's basic ego functions are not sufficiently developed, these are carried out by the therapist on his behalf within a psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy . The therapist thus assumes the auxiliary ego function. The aim is to enable the patient to identify with the practitioner to recognize situations and to be able to react to them similarly in the long term.

Example and comparison

An auxiliary ego works in a similar way to a mental and emotional “taster”: Thoughts and emotions relating to a certain situation are “sampled”. The taster (i.e. the therapist) forms an opinion about the taste, palatability or inedibility of the situation and communicates the result to the patient with a recommendation. In this way the therapist makes his own regulating signals available to the patient: "I would be wide awake and experience: Hello, watch out!" The patient can now try to identify with the therapist and thus learn the ability over the long term to assess similar situations for oneself and to react appropriately to them.

Tasks of the auxiliary ego

Reality check

If the patient is based on uncertain boundaries between internal and external experience, distorted ideas arise about what is going on in a situation he has experienced. This situation or human interaction should be illuminated in relation to reality and the distortion resolved in this way.

Anticipation

The auxiliary ego is supposed to promote the patient's ability to foresee and recognize the action intentions of another person.

integration

The image a patient has of himself or of another person may contain irreconcilable contradictions. For example, he experiences the other person split into “only good” and sometimes “only bad”. The other can be idealized in one moment, and devalued and heaped with guilt in the next. Own shares or those of another person can also be completely denied. Here, the auxiliary ego has the task of connecting these contradicting images to one another to form an overall picture in which the opposites can be reconciled. In technical terms, contradicting self and object representations are integrated here.

See also

Individual evidence

Web links