The Development Of The Ego: Insights From Clinical Work With Infants And Young Children

This paper describes how the ego develops from its somatic-sensory-affective foundation to embrace object relations, to expand into a range of drive-affect-thematic domains, and to organize itself into self-object patterns and structures. It is postulated that the early growth of the ego can be characterized in terms of six levels of experiential organization including early stages of relatively undifferentiated somatic and behavioral self-object patterns and global reactivity, and later stages of differentiated representational experience and selective adaptive and defensive transformations of experience. Characterizing early ego development into stages facilitates understanding of how the ego develops and of the contributions of unique biological and experiential patterns in adaptive and maladaptive development. It is also postulated that each stage of ego development has as part of its foundation constitutional-maturational patterns related to sensory affective processing and integration, as well as haracteristic caregiver-infant and child interaction patterns. The relation between individually different patterns of sensory-affective processing and specific environmental (experiential) patterns is considered. Hypotheses and research strategies are suggested which may prove helpful in studying how biology and experience interact in the formation of psychopathology and of defensive structures.