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highly valued moral behavior may have roots in instinctual tenden–
cies or self-interest has led to the mistaken view that high valuation
is an illusion." Hartmann speaks of this as "the genetic mistake."
(To illustrate: if moral revulsion against sadism is a reaction–
formation against the infantile pleasure in destruction, is moral re–
vulsion devalued by its origins in an opposite tendency? The psycho–
analytic view is that the later moral attitude has achieved inde–
pendence from its instinctual origins, that it has autonomy in the
sphere of mental operations and has validity for what it is, a stable
and permanent moral attitude that guarantees against the return of
the instinct.)
There is the common belief that psychoanalysis empties the
contents of the id and brings the instinctual life and unconscious
mental processes under the control of the ego and rationality. (Rieff,
too, is inclined to see psychoanalytic therapy in this light.) Hart–
mann, who has much to say about rationality in the volume under
discussion also touched on this problem in an essay published twenty
years ago and recently reissued
(Ego Psychology and the Problem
of Adaptation).
Hartmannn suggests that a misconception has
arisen
out
of Freud's statement, "Where id was, there shall ego
be."
"It does not mean," Hartmann comments, "that there has ever been,
or could
be,
a man who is purely rational; it implies only a cultural
historical tendency and a therapeutic goal" [expressed in relative
terms]. "There is no danger that the id could ever
be
'dried up'
nor that all the ego functions could be reduced to intellectual func–
tions." This "rational" man, if he could be produced, would be a
"man without qualities" says Hartmann, borrowing Musil's phrase.
It should
be
mentioned that Hartmann in his essay on moral
values does not alter in any way Freud's own views on the psychol–
ogy of moral behavior or the position he stated for psychoanalysis
in regard to moral values. Rieff is under the impression that there
is a "school" of ego-psychology that has revised Freudian psychology
and has "attacked" (Freud's) "weakling conception of the ego."
Hartmann is in fact one of the leading scholars in the field of ego–
psychology but the theorists in this field (Rieff mentions Kris, for
example) are not members of a deviant or revisionist wing of psy–
choanalysis. They are in the mainstream of Freudian psychoanalysis.
It was Freud himself who in the 'twenties turned the attention of
