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Gulliver's Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms is a voyage through the turbulent sea of adolescence. Adolescence is present in many forms in Book IV: in Gulliver's attack on figures and institutions of authority which, in the light of his new and idealizing ideology, seem suddenly intolerable; in his renewed preoccupation
with his body, with his appearance, and with his acceptance by an idealized group and 'other'; in his pervasive preoccupation with questions of personal identity; but in nothing so richly as in the resurgence of instinctual forces (Yahoos) which threaten and disgust him, and in the protective development of powerful superego forces (Houyhnhnms) and the emergence of an ego ideal (same) he strives to imitate and merge with. Gulliver is the adaptive perceiver, the weak adolescent ego trapped between these forces and searching for his identity in or between them. The questions Book IV raises about the identity of man are among the questions that define the controversy between classical psychoanalysis and revisionist ego psychology: what is the nature, strength, and independence-level of the ego?