You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Experience already gained in analytic work with psychotics during early stages of psycho-analysis, notably through the influence of the Zürich school, had led Freud to pay greater attention than previously to early ego-development and to formulate his concept of primary narcissism. Further analytic investigation of psychotic states, and the more and more frequent observations of certain character disorders, have made it obvious that the deficiences and deformations in the organization of ego-structure, over and above the neurotic defence systems and mechanisms, are of prime importance for the understanding of such disorders. Freud's distinction between narcissistic and transference neuroses is a sign of this recognition.
Nevertheless, it has been the predominant tendency in psycho-analytic thinking to keep the phenomena of conflict and of defence mechanisms in the forefront of clinical investigation, to make them the basis of theoretical constructions concerning the psychic apparatus and its dynamics and economics, and to understand developmental processes as such in terms of defence. Interest was centred on the structure and functions of neurotic symptom formation and other phenomena in the series of psycho-logical manifestations of anxiety, conflict, and the defensive reactions against them.
The central importance of conflict, anxiety, and defence for any concrete understanding of normal and pathological psychological processes is based on very specific constellations in the growth period of human beings. The infant and child, equipped at birth only with certain automatic mechanisms for maintaining himself in equilibrium with the environment, increasingly becomes confronted with external conditions of an extremely complex nature. These complex external conditions, external from the point of view of the observer, are not merely sets of 'biological' events, but events of different orders of integration which we call psycho-logical, cultural, social. These events