Final answer:
Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, is the author of The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, which provided a detailed analysis of defense mechanisms.
Step-by-step explanation:
The author of The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense and the person who gave us the first comprehensive study of defense mechanisms is Anna Freud. This book, published in 1936, was a seminal work in the field of psychology and added to the work her father, Sigmund Freud, had done on psychoanalytic theory. While Sigmund Freud pioneered the concept of defense mechanisms as part of his psychoanalytic theory, it was Anna Freud who further elaborated on the ego and its mechanisms of defense, contributing significantly to our understanding of personality and psychology.
Sigmund Freud, Anna’s father, was noted for his comprehensive theory of personality and for being the first to suggest that much of our mental life is unconscious. He proposed different components of personality such as the id, ego, and superego, and described the development of personality through stages centered around different erogenous zones. His observation that the ego uses defense mechanisms to protect itself from anxiety was a groundbreaking contribution to psychology.