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The infant uses inborn and learned regulation and adaptation mechanisms to establish physiological homeostasis. The little child does the same to establish psychic equilibrium. The author considers that all pathological defence mechanisms seen in the neuroses and psychoses of latency and adulthood are the same mechanisms that served normal ego development in early childhood where their role of adaptation and regulation is stressed. This formulation has the advantage of emphasizing the continuum of physiological-biological and psychic processes in the normal and the abnormal. When at first with the help of an auxiliary ego borrowed from the mother the ego succeeds in using the various mechanisms from the aspect of their regulative and adaptive side, conflicts may be solved in a way what stimulates balance and growth. When the ego has to fight too strongly against the drives, for inner or external reasons, using all available forces for the maintenance of its still precarious organization, a lasting disturbance may result. (In this respect it is the ego's capacity to deal with the aggressive drives which is of paramount importance. Every conflict promotes free aggression which is possibly more unsuitable for neutralization than is libido and most dangerous to the developing ego when turned against the self.) We should speak of a real childhood neurosis only when the defensive functions of the mechanisms outbalances the regulative functions and interferes with ego growth. Precisely because