The Psychoanalytical Boundaries of the Ego: Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan.

The commonly accepted boundaries between the ego and the non-ego are naturally weakened by the experience of psychoanalysis, as is revealed by the Freudian Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. This article sets out to map the boundaries of the ego in psychoanalytic theory. The aim is twofold. First, to provide a metapsychological portrait of the ego by way of a consideration of its genesis, its outlines, and its limits as theorized by the main authors of the analytic corpus. Second, to show how this theory can provide new insights in approaching the concept of the ego. Besides considering Freud's work, this article weaves together three threads by reappraising the writings of Melanie Klein, Donald W. Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan. While Freud raises a number of crucial points relating to the boundaries of the ego, a comparative reading of these three authors highlights how their work reconsiders, elaborates on, or goes beyond Freud's views. From a reading of the Freudian corpus emerges a threefold definition of the boundaries of the ego: (1) intrasubjective: the ego opens onto the id, but is strictly separate from the repressed; (2) extrasubjective: the ego is established through opposition to external reality; (3) intersubjective: the ego, as it relates to the other, is experienced both as separated from the object while at the same time being the object of a series of identifications. Each in their own way, Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan shed new light on these questions according to their particular readings of different aspects of Freud's work. The aim of this paper is to underline the originality of these four authors by pointing out what they have in common and, then, where their thinking diverges. It also sheds light on a whole set of questions (the separation between the ego as agency and the subject of the unconscious, between the ego and reality, between the outside and the inside, between the subject and the object, between the ego and the alter ego) that pervade psychoanalytical theory. Ultimately it is the fragmentation of the Freudian Ich – as revealed by its diverse readings by the post-Freudians according to their respective clinical paradigms – that is the key to understanding the extent of the problem of the ego in psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]