The Wisdom of the Ego"Because creativity is so intrinsic to this alchemy of the ego, Vaillant mingles these life studies with psychobiographies of famous artists and others. We meet Florence Nightingale, the intractable hypochondriac and hopeless dreamer who, at the age of thirty-one, wrote in her diary, "I see nothing desirable but death," and we watch as she transforms her anguish into altruism, her hapless fantasies into fantastic success. In the tormented life of Sylvia Plath, we see psychosis as not only a defect but also an effort at repair, her poetry as an extraordinary illustration of the adaptive process. We witness the mature working of the mind's defenses in the career of Anna Freud, their greatest elucidator. And we see the wisdom of the ego at work as Eugene O'Neill evolves from self-destructive youth to creator of great art." "In these compelling portraits of obscure and famous lives, Vaillant charts the evolution of the ego's defenses, from the psychopathic to the sublime, and from the mundane to the most ingenious. An account of the boundless psychological resilience of adult development, The Wisdom of the Ego is a brilliant summation of the mind's amazing power to fashion creative victories out of life's would-be defeats."--Jacket |
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Contents
Introduction I | 1 |
A Matter of Definition | 28 |
Mutually exclusive ways of identifying the defenses | 36 |
SelfDeceptions of Everyday Life | 76 |
Necessary Questions | 96 |
How Can We Prove That Defenses Exist? | 118 |
Correlations between maturity of defenses and measures | 131 |
The Ego and Adult Development | 141 |
Major differences between the more and the less | 218 |
Creativity and Psychotic Defenses | 231 |
Mature Defenses | 248 |
The Maturation of Defenses | 266 |
Disadvantage Resilience and Mature Defenses | 284 |
Eleven vulnerable Core City men and their | 286 |
How Does the Ego Mature? | 326 |
| 365 | |
Psychosocial stages reached by members of | 168 |
Life Histories | 175 |
The Ego and Creativity | 203 |
Acknowledgments | 383 |
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Bibliographic information
| Title | The Wisdom of the Ego |
| Author | George E. Vaillant |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press, 1995 |
| ISBN | 0674953738, 9780674953734 |
| Length | 394 pages |
| Subjects | › › Psychology / General Psychology / Movements / Psychoanalysis |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |