The Conception of the Ego

Recent contributions to the psychology of the ego have introduced into this concept topographical complexities which tend to obscure its fundamental predicates.

Our need now would seem to be to relate this complicated structure to the fundamental dynamics of mental functioning, or in other words to instinctual activity.

It might seem that this has already been done in Freud's original antithesis of ego and sex instincts which regards the ego as the psychological expression of tendencies subserving the biological end of self-preservation. But the relation of the ego to instinct nowadays requires further elucidation than is furnished by this simple equation.

An enquiry into this relation might usefully begin with the examination of a hypothetical primal ego.

We may safely allot to this primal ego two basic functions which persist throughout its subsequent elaboration.

One of these deals with internal happenings and imposes a check on the immediacies of instinctual impulses (Triebe), in the interests of better adaptation to external reality; the other deals with external happenings by utilizing perceptions and memory-traces to arrive at appropriate motor adjustments.

These complementary activities, control of motility, and adaptation to reality with the help of memory-traces and perceptions remain the fundamental attributes of the ego, and survive in Freud's later conception of the real ego, as distinct from the super-ego.

At this hypothetical early stage in the phylogenesis of the ego, its rõle in subserving self-preservation is obvious and uncomplicated. Any modification of pre-existing more stereotyped instinctual responses, which permitted a wider range of possible adaptations under environmental stresses, would have a high survival value. It is a fairly safe assumption that the emergence of the primal ego and with it the development of intelligence was the outcome of some environmental change which rendered previous stereotyped instinctual responses relatively insuffi