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This paper attempts to trace the development-pattern of general psycho-analytic theory on the ground that present tendencies can be most easily understood in the light of their historical perspective.
In the early stages (when the Three Contributions to Sexual Theory was published in 1905) the psyche appeared as a two-fold system, consciousness (including the pre-conscious) and the unconscious (equated with the repressed), and could be regarded topographically as a series of levels. Mental life was also described dynamically in terms of instinctual drives. A big advance had been made in knowledge of the sexual instincts but the ego was still unexplored and the psychic mechanisms so far recognized were chiefly repression and displacement. Subsequent increase in knowledge of the organization of infantile sexuality, of the rôle of sadism and of the nature of the ego culminated in Freud's recognition of a primary instinct of aggression and the publication in 1923 of The Ego and the Id which laid the foundation of modern theory. The psyche has now become a three-fold system consisting of the Id, the unorganized reservoir of instinctual drives and the Ego and Super-ego, the organized systems through which these operate and by which they are controlled. The unconscious is no longer equated with the repressed, the existence of other methods of instinctual defence, notably introjection and projection, is recognized, and the economic canon of description, the notion of distribution of energy between systems, has been added to the topographic and dynamic. It is evident that we can no longer study development in terms of a theory of impulses alone but must at every stage be prepared to take into account the type of ego-organization through which they operate and the mechanisms by which they are controlled, including the degree of ego-differentiation and of reality-sense development which obtains. The theory of development in terms of libidinal stages has to be expanded in