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A narcissistic need to deny that ego was once purely id and the overemphasis on structural ego psychology are responsible for the tendency to look upon early disturbances of the mental function as though they did not differ in etiology from the psychoneuroses. Psychoanalytic reconstructions often 'carry back' the established findings of the four-year old and by so doing the early unknown is read in terms of the later known. Glover calls this the anthropomorphizing of Freud's master concept of the mental apparatus.
In this paper, an abbreviated form of which was presented at the Zurich Congress of 1949, Glover studies the earliest levels of mental function and the pathology thereof. To one who tries to isolate these primitive phases, five different topics offer themselves for investigation. They are: the psychic stresses (traumatic excitation), the defense mechanisms characteristic of one given phase, the id-ego boundaries, the ego-object relations and the sequence of symptom formations. By this method Glover arrives at a serial development of the mental apparatus which provides an understanding of the early functional disorders of the mind. Descriptively, three phases can be differentiated. However, these overlap as the earliest mental function does not atrophy but continues throughout life alongside the more developed organizations (primacy of function).
During the primary functional phase, 'stress without conflict' results from damming-up of instinct quantities and the opposition of instinctual aims. The responses are mainly uncoördinated motor discharges and reduction of excitation through regression (to sleep). Anticathexis is used in the control of frustration and leads to the development of the system preconscious which gains importance in the next stage. The id-ego boundaries are determined by primitive imaginal representations and primary identification is maintained by regression and beginning projections. Object relations of the introjection type