Abstract

HEINZ HARTMANN, M.D. (New York)1 If we are to study the processes and the problems which the concept "reality principle" is meant to cover, there is still no better point of departure than Freud's paper on the "Two Principles of Mental Func­ tioning," first published in 1911. This work is important and interesting in another respect also. It deals specifically with a number of ego func­ tions, such as consciousness, thinking, attention, judgment, action-and does so avant La lettre, if I may say so, before ego psychology had become an integrated part of psychoanalysis; that is to say, his studies of ego functions had not yet appeared in the framework of the set of propositions which we call ego psychology today. At the time Freud used the terms pleasure ego and reality ego, and what was later to become the distinction of ego and id was still represented as an opposition of ego drives and sexual drives. One of the many essential contributions of the paper was the observation that while the ego drives are ready to yield to the influ­ ence of the reality principle, the sexual drives remain much longer under the dominance of the pleasure principle,