Smith D L
Antioch University, Regent's College, London.
Int J Psychoanal. 1988;69 ( Pt 3):401-7.
The term 'ego' can be found in Freud's writings from his earliest psychoanalytic works onwards. Hartmann was the first scholar to suggest a solution to some of the apparent ambiguity in Freud's use of the term by distinguishing the self-representation from the structural ego of the second topography. Ultimately, Hartmann sought to confine the term 'ego' to the designation of a theoretical entity as opposed to an experiential reality. A careful reading of Freud reveals that he used the term 'das Ich' to designate both a set of experiences and the theoretical entity formulated to explain them. On the phenomenological level Freud describes the ego in terms of (a) the self representation, (b) the felt sense of existence and (c) the phenomenon of action. An application of this approach to understanding Freud to his accounts of the superego and ego ideal suggests that there is no inherent antagonism between the two concepts and that the difference between the two is fundamentally one of levels of abstraction. The superego emerges as a phase-specific organization of the ego.
“自我”（ego）一词在弗洛伊德最早的精神分析著作及其后的作品中均有出现。哈特曼是首位提出解决方案的学者，他通过区分自我表征与第二地形学中的结构性自我，解决了弗洛伊德使用该术语时一些明显的歧义。最终，哈特曼试图将“自我”一词限定为一个理论实体的名称，而非一种经验现实。仔细研读弗洛伊德的著作会发现，他用“das Ich”一词来指代一系列体验以及为解释这些体验而构建的理论实体。在现象学层面，弗洛伊德从以下几个方面描述自我：（a）自我表征；（b）存在感；（c）行动现象。将这种理解弗洛伊德的方法应用于他对超我和自我理想的阐述中，可以发现这两个概念之间并无内在冲突，二者的差异从根本上来说只是抽象层面的不同。超我是自我在特定阶段的组织形式。
