Ego Function Assessment (EFA-36)

Thirty-six statements describe how well a person manages the tasks of everyday mental life: judging situations realistically, keeping a stable sense of what is real and what is imagined, regulating impulses and emotions, sustaining relationships, using fantasy and play creatively, concentrating and remembering, and synthesizing different parts of experience into a coherent whole. The items are organized into four factors: Reality Contact, Drive and Affect Regulation, Object Relations and Adaptive Regression, and Autonomous Efficacy.

Hartmann (1939) argued that the ego includes functions such as perception, memory and motor control that develop outside conflict and serve adaptation. Bellak, Hurvich and Gediman (1973) operationalized ego psychology into twelve ego functions, including reality testing, judgment, sense of reality, regulation of drives and affects, object relations, thought processes, adaptive regression in the service of the ego, defensive functioning, stimulus barrier, autonomous functioning, synthetic-integrative functioning and mastery-competence, and rated them through clinical interview. This self-report adaptation was written with items from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) and groups the functions into four broader factors.

Each factor is scored separately, and the four scores are read as a profile of relative strengths. Higher scores describe more effective functioning in that area; lower scores describe areas where functioning is more easily disrupted, for example under stress. The profile describes capacities, not a diagnosis, and it can change over time and with treatment.

The assessment is used in psychodynamic case formulation, in tracking change in therapy and in research. On this site, the Defense Mechanism Questionnaire (DMQ-30) describes defensive styles, the Brief Self-Control Scale (BSCS) and Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) describe aspects of regulation from a cognitive tradition, and the Cognitive Failures scale describes everyday lapses of attention and memory.

The construct domains assessed (reality testing, impulse control, object relations, thought process, defensive functioning, autonomous functioning) derive from Bellak's ego-psychology framework. IPIP item selection followed convergent validity with theoretically related constructs.

“Frequently get things mixed up in my head.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.