THE GROWTH AND TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN EGO PSYCHOLOGY The roots of ego psychology trace back to Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and

and for over two decades it maintained a monolithic hegemony over American psychoanalysis. Within this framework the conceptions of the psychoanalytic psychotherapies evolved as specific modifications of psychoanalytic technique directed to the clinical needs of the spectrum of patients not amenable to psychoanalysis proper. This American consensus on the ego psychology paradigm and its array of technical implementa-tions fragmented several decades ago, with the rise in America of Kohut’s self psychology, geared to the narcissistic disorders, and with the importation from Britain of neo-Kleinian and object-relational per-spectives, all coinciding with the rapid growth of the varieties of relational psychoanalysis, with its shift in focus to the two-person, interactive, and co-constructed transference-countertransference matrix. Implications of this intermingled theoretical pluralism (as contrasted with the unity of the once dominant ego psychology paradigm) for the evolution of the American ego psychology are spelled out. My intent here is to present an overview of ego psychology,the metapsychological paradigm developed in the immediate post–World War II period, primarily in America, by a brilliant cluste