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The Ego occupies a central place in Winnicott's theorising as is highlighted in Axiom 2: «It would be wrong to put the instinctual gratification (feeding etc.) or object relationship (relation to the breast) before the matter of ego organization (i.e., infant ego reinforced by maternal ego). There is no id before ego».
In relation to the Freudian position, the Author's aim is to give priority to the developmental task of constructing the Ego rather than to subvert the idea of the Ego's derivation from the Id. The greater conceptual gap is evidently with Klein who theorises an Ego present from birth «though in a rudimentary form and largely lacking coherence» (Axiom 2) and needing work of progressive integration against the tendency to disintegration.
The discussion of the Ego is deepened and widened along two overlapping strands of theory. The first strand, which draws on the Ego's constitutionally relational features, emphasizes the facilitating function of maternal care to which the infant adds its own somato-psychic endowment with the aim of creating «an environment-individual set-up» (Axiom 1) that requires a period of time to evolve towards a more predominantly relational structure, the matrix of the possibility «to begin to exist, to have experience, to build a personal ego, to ride instincts» (Axiom 1.1).
The idea of a relative initial undifferentiation between the mother's breast and the infans, and of a gradual construction of the object, is also found in Freud's thinking: «to begin with, the child does not distinguish between the breast and its own body; when the breast has to be separated from the body and shifted to the ‘outside’; […] it carries with it as an ‘object’ a part of the original narcissistic libidinal cathexis» (Axiom 6.1.1)