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Analytical experience has two poles, with reality as the axis: one is an experience of demythification, in the course of which the ego, by contact with another person who makes possible the development of fantasied relation and its reduction, is enabled to reintegrate that part of itself which had been driven into the unconscious by anxiety or by reality. The second is an experience of identification which allows the introjection of an object different from the primitive images which have contributed to the formation of the ego in the course of its development. The 'object' approaches gradually nearer to other real people. The transference neurosis which leads the patient to confuse the analyst with the imago is resolved through a series of modifications of this 'significant' object which escapes from its narcissistic forms in order to come closer to reality, though without arriving there completely.
The various identification theories express a part of reality from different standpoints. This paper is an effort at synthesis leading to a partly new formulation of ego-structuration in terms of cathexes. This formulation of the real arises from day-by-day clinical work.2
Our concept implies that for restructuring the ego in the course of treatment some mechanisms come into play which resemble those used in early ego-structuration. We give particular importance to the object relationship which appears as a mediator of reality at the same time as a regulator, being an antithetic factor of the primary narcissism of mental life. We also recognize that the psychological factors, though a continuation of the biological ones, involve a change of structure which makes the ego very different from its original form, so much so that we can fix the moment when it appears.
The ego is here defined as the whole of the personality in its structural and functional perspective. Its functional form is the result of the integration of a series of provisional forms whose origins ena