Ego States in Heart-Centered therapies

Journal of Heart Centered Therapies, Spring, 2003 by David Hartman, Diane Zimberoff

Cathexis: an attached or allocated charge of energy that activates a psychological process.

Ego cathexis: a kind or quality of energy that is the bearer of the essence of selfness. It is a living energy and is subject. Any element invested with it is experienced as `T' or "my"; hence, belonging to "me" as a part of my self.

Object cathexis: a kind or quality of energy that bears no essence of selfness. It is a nonliving energy and is object. Any element invested with it is experienced as "it" or "not me"; hence, belonging to something outside my self. However, my awareness of it occurs only after it has impacted my ego.

Federn thus became much more specific than Freud about the nature of the ego's boundaries, those that separate the ego from the id, and from the outside world. These ego states are experienced within the context of a unifying, integrating energy that gives us the "feeling of unity, continuity, contiguity and causality" in our experience. We sense our self as being a oneness (unity), not as being many. We think of this self as having always existed (continuity), as being indestructible. All the elements of the self are in close proximity, in communication with each other, so that a stimulus to one part is simultaneously transmitted throughout to all parts (contiguity). We view ourselves as being rational and subject to the normal laws of cause and effect (causality). Thus, Federn defined experience as an investment of continuously changing contents with the unifying, coherent ego feeling. And he suggested that the ego state that is most highly cathected at any given time holds the executive power and is felt as the self. Movement of the executive experience from one ego state to another occurs along a common bridge, be it memory, linguistic, affective, or somatic.

Table 1 is taken from Watkins (1978, p. 144), representing the structure of personality as conceived in Federn's theoretical system. Federn recognized the one ego state most cathected as dominant, or aroused, although he did not use the term executive ego state. Normally all of one's ego states are invested with some degree of self-energy, or cathected, but in any given here and now moment the executive is the ego state most activated with the greatest energy, thus experiencing itself as subject. An individual is in one situation, perhaps reading an academic treatise on ego states, and experiences herself as Ego State A. Someone enters the room and interrupts her, asking if she wants to go to a party across town tonight. Ego State A becomes deactivated and the cathexis flows to Ego State B, which then becomes executive. The thoughts that were foremost when Ego State A was executive fade into relative unawareness, experienced only dimly on the borders of consciousness, to be replaced by new thoughts relating to the relationship with her friend and the potential experience of the party. She may then return to her reading (Ego State A) or begin preparing to go to the party (Ego State C). In each dominant state, she is peripherally aware that each of the other states experienced alternately as executive are in fact her own self, the boundaries between ego states are permeable. She experiences that feeling of unity, continuity, contiguity, and causality referred to by Federn. In his own words (Federn, 1952, p. 225):