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There are characteristic long range patterns of sensory perception involved in the defences of the ego against a traumatic overloading of the perceptual apparatus. Sensory modalities at birth and early in life, such as vision, that can be stimulated but cannot adequately respond to the stimulus are possibly more susceptible to traumatic involvement than those when the response is more adequate, such as touch or taste. These patterns of sensory perception appear in relation to past traumatic experiences and narcissistic masturbatory fantasies and are related to recurrent nightmares of adult life, pavor nocturnus attacks in childhood, and primal scene fantasies.
Sensory perceptions act as focal points for various memories and the traumata that occur throughout life. These perceptions also express instinctual needs and are utilized by the ego in the development of complex, multi-layered patterns of defence, especially against affect perception. Patterns of sensory perception are a fundamental part of character development from the time of birth. The association and integration of various sensory stimuli produce ego nuclei which arise in part owing to the necessity to master trauma. A fundamental part of an ego nucleus is also the nucleus of a trauma. Part of the mastery of such trauma consists in integrating and recasting various aspects of it by perception of a pattern. In proper dosage, trauma may assist the development of the integrative faculty and/or ego formation, just as too great a dosage may lead to dissociation. In recording the ebb and flow of sensory excitation caused by trauma, either integration may be enhanced or an attempt at reparative mastery (repetition compulsion) begun. In this sense, the primitive ego nucleus consists of sensory patterns integrated by the trauma of birth and the early post-natal experiences. The function of memory is closely related not only to traumatic occurrences and sensory perception but also to how new traumata and patterns of perception fit in with the old. One can conceive of the primal birth trauma as an agent which causes a poorly differentiated mass of perceptual stimuli which are practically objectless in quality to coalesce into a series of rudimentary pattern-like structures which are in themselves a primitive body image nucleus and representative of the patterning of the earliest ego nucleus if not in itself the same nucleus. From there on, there is an ever more involved plot in search of characters of increasing complexity.