Adult development and symptomatology

The purpose of the current study was to explore relationships between symptomatology and ego development in adults. To that end we studied patients presenting for treatment in an outpatient clinic of a major psychiatric hospital. We examined the relationship of ego development to intensity of subjective distress and type of presenting symptoms and hypothesized that with increasing development of ego functioning, subjective distress from all kinds of psychiatric symptoms could be better tolerated and coped with and, therefore, would be experienced as less severe. For the sample as a whole, ego development was significantly related to psychiatric symptoms and symptom severity in patterns predicted from theory. On all but two scales, symptomatology decreased significantly as ego development increased. We argue that the ego development model is useful in further exploring psychopathology during the adult years.