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Recent psychoanalytic literature on the multiple functions of the ego, its defensive mechanisms, reality testing function, and its relationship to the peripheral organs of the body is quite abundant, but very little has been written on the structure of the ego itself. It has been emphasized that one of the most important tasks of psychoanalysis is a deeper investigation into the structure and functions of the ego.1 Anna Freud has written a book2 devoted to this recent development of psychoanalysis. Its chief concern is not with instinctual drives themselves, but with how and why the ego deals with these instincts either by rejection or mastery.
This paper is based on fundamental investigations in cerebral anatomy and physiology from which certain tentative theoretical formulations may be postulated concerning the structure of the ego, particularly its psychology and its relations to the architecture and function of the cerebral cortex. The inquiry will be limited to the ego as a perceptive apparatus which maintains contact with reality, rather than to its repressive activities. The structure of the ego is a topographic as well as a dynamic problem; closely related are not only the functions of the cerebral cortex but also its cytoarchitecture.
Such a theoretical interpretation and reconstruction may be useful to develop more practical concepts, though it is impossible in our present state of knowledge to bridge the mental and the physical. Some years ago Jacques Loeb3 called attention