Ego-Dystonia: a Review in Search of Definitions

The ego-dystonic experience refers to the negative assessment that the subject makes of some of their thoughts or emotions, in the context of a conserved state of consciousness, as well as other aspects of their social and intrapersonal life that are relatively intact. Ego-dystonia is a widely used construct, but one that has not been defined in reasonably operational terms. Perhaps this explains why it is no longer used in contemporary classifications of mental disorders such as the ICD-11 and DSM-5. It is related to the awareness of the mental illness, with feelings of guilt and shame, but intuitively we perceive relevant differences between all these experiences. Psychoanalytic theory conceives the ego-dystonic as an alteration in the early structuring of the ego. Cognitive psychology conceives it as a dysfunction of the corrective mechanisms that harmonise the cognitive and the metacognitive. Evolutionary theory has not addressed the issue directly, but through the analysis of guilt, to which it attributes a high adaptive value, since it limits aggression and promotes reparative behaviours. Given the importance of the concept of self-attunement, it is surprising how little theoretical and empirical research there is on the subject, the clarification of which could represent a considerable advance in the field of mental health.