Ego Integration in Child Development (1962)

The term ego can be used to describe that part of the growing human personality that tends, under suitable conditions, to become integrated into a unit.

In the body of an anencephalic infant functional events, including instinctual localizations, may be taking place, events that would be called experiences of id-function if there were a brain. It could be said that if there had been a normal brain there would have been an organization of these functions, and to this organization could have been given the label ego. But with no electronic apparatus there can be no experience, and therefore no ego.

But id-functioning is normally not lost; it is collected together in all its aspects and becomes ego-experience. There is thus no sense in making use of the word ‘id’ for phenomena that are not covered and catalogued and experienced and eventually interpreted by ego-functioning.

In the very early stages of the development of a human child, therefore, ego-functioning needs to be taken as a concept that is inseparable from that of the existence of the infant as a person. What instinctual life there may be apart from ego-functioning can be ignored, because the infant is not yet an entity having experiences. There is no id before ego. Only from this premise can a study of the ego be justified.

It will be seen that the ego offers itself for study long before the word self has relevance. The word self arrives after the child has begun to use the intellect to look-at what others see or feel or hear and what they conceive of when they meet this infant body. (The concept of the self will not be studied in this chapter.)

The first question that is asked about that which is labelled ego is this: is there an ego from the start? The answer is that the start is when the ego starts.1

Then the second question arises: is the ego strong or weak? The answer to this second question depends on the actual mother and