On the Development of Mental Functioning1

The paper I shall present is a contribution to metapsychology, an attempt to carry further Freud's fundamental theories on this subject in the light of conclusions derived from progress in psycho-analytic practice.

Freud's formulation of mental structure in terms of id, ego and superego has become the basis for all psycho-analytic thinking. He made it clear that these parts of the self are not sharply separated from one another and that the id is the foundation of all mental functioning. The ego develops out of the id, but Freud gave no consistent indication at which stage this happens; throughout life the ego reaches deep down into the id and is therefore under the constant influence of unconscious processes.

Moreover, his discovery of the life and death instincts, with their polarity and fusion operating from birth onwards, was a tremendous advance in the understanding of the mind. I recognized, in watching the constant struggle in the young infant's mental processes between an irrepressible urge to destroy as well as to save himself, to attack his objects and to preserve them, that primordial forces struggling with each other were at work. This gave me a deeper insight into the vital clinical importance of Freud's concept of life and death instincts. When I wrote The Psycho-Analysis of Children(6)2, I had already come to the conclusion that under the impact of the struggle between the two instincts, one of the ego's main functions—the mastery of anxiety—is brought into operation from the very beginning of life.3

Freud assumed that the organism protects itself against the danger arising from the death instinct working within by deflecting it outwards, while that portion of it which cannot be deflected is bound by the libido. He considered in Beyond the Pleasure Principle(1) the operation of the life and death instincts as biological processes. But it has not been sufficiently recognized that Freud in some of his writings based his clinical considerations on th