Introduction

The main theme of these collected papers is the carrying back of the application of Freud's theories to infancy. Freud showed us that psycho-neurosis has its point of origin in the interpersonal relationships of the first maturity, belonging to the toddler age. I have played a part in the exploration of the idea that mental hospital disorders relate to failures of development in infancy. Schizophrenic illness in this way shows up as the negative of processes that can be traced in detail as the positive processes of maturation in the infancy and early childhood of the individual.

Dependence in early infancy is a fact, and in these papers I have tried to take dependence right into the theory of personality growth. Ego-psychology only makes sense if based firmly on the fact of dependence, and on the study of infancy as well as on the study of primitive mental mechanisms and psychic processes.

The beginning of ego emergence entails at first an almost absolute dependence on the supportive ego of the mother-figure and on her carefully graduated failure of adaptation. This is part of what I have called ‘good-enough mothering’; in this way the environment takes its place among the other essential features of dependence, within which the infant is developing and is employing primitive mental mechanisms.

One aspect of the disturbance of ego emergence produced by environmental failure is the dissociation that is seen in the ‘borderline case’ in terms of the true and the false selves. I have developed this theme in my own way, seeing the representatives of this dissociation in healthy persons and in healthy living (private self reserved for intimacies, and public self adapted for socialization), and also examining the pathology of the same condition. At the extreme of illness I see the true self as a potentiality, hidden and preserved by the compliant false self, which latter is then a defence organization that is based on the various functions of the ego apparatus and on self-car