Le Coultre refers to Freud's concept of ego-splitting in the defensive process and emphasizes the developmental continuity of id and ego, primary and secondary processes and pleasure and reality principles. By reference to examples he demonstrates that the neurotic conflict is not a conflict between id and ego, but one between two id–ego domains, i.e. it is a conflict between an adult, but impoverished, ego which has become reality-syntonic and a primitive ego, split-off as the result of trauma, which is then therapeutically activated in the transference and made accessible to analytic work.