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This paper is a preliminary report preparing for more intensive study of the early development of partial functions eventually synthesized into the ego. The author challenges the claim of adequacy and vitality of some psycho-analytic theories concerning early infancy, for example, the assumption that the unconscious mental life of the adult (or of the post-infantile child) is a replica of the infant's experiences. The controversy regarding the development of female sexuality illustrates especially well the fallacy of seeking to define infantile life in terms of adult 'complexes'. The author proposes and elucidates the thesis that the need to learn how to do things—the 'instinct to master' (related to Freud's reference to a Bewältigungstrieb)—manifested in the infant's practice of its sensory, motor and intellectual means for mastering its environment, is at least as important as pleasure-seeking mechanisms during its first two years of life. Normal ego development and neurotic compulsion are considered in their relationship to the early learning period as a phase of the 'instinct to master'; compulsiveness, in its broad aspects, being considered a regression to the normal stage of the unlearned function and associated with an inability to exercise proficiently a function which gratifies the need to master.