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Semantic difficulties will be overcome by repeated discussion of the field under examination. Consciousness, the road to the unconscious, has been rather neglected so far. It is everywhere accepted that hypotheses can be discarded as soon as they are falsified. Melanie Klein attempted to falsify the concept of primary narcissism. In the author's opinion primary narcissism is susceptible of analysis in terms of object relationships. Such object relations seem to be between an early ego which are neither stably internal nor external. 'With fragmentation stability of internalization and externalization disappears. Fragmentation appears to be dynamic and not regressive to a preintegrated state of ego nuclei such as Glover proposed.'
The testing of the death instinct theory has in the past led us to the study of sleep and infancy; in future it will lead us to the study of old age and dying.
One of the earliest mechanisms of inhibition is sleep, actual or hallucinated. Sleep can be aggressive. How far is this allied to the silent infantile helplessness? We shall have to distinguish between