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Present-day ego psychology recognizes that there is a certain degree of constancy and reliability in the ego organization which does not have to be created anew. This constancy and reliability is designated 'the autonomy of the ego', a concept first stressed by Heinz Hartmann. In order to understand ego psychology, Rapaport discusses three basic questions. 'If the ego grows on conflict, how are we to conceive of the participants of this original conflict? The ego is both born out of conflict and a part to the conflict.' Rapaport's answer is based on three sources. In studying infants, those individual differences observable from the beginning suggest inborn personality determinants. Freud, in Psychoanalysis Terminable and Interminable, suggests such a hypothesis. In addition there is some interindividual consistency which indicates that the apparatuses of perception, memory and motility are inborn characteristics even before they become expressive of conflict and experience. Later on, one or another of these apparatuses may remain outside the sphere of conflict, even in the psychoses. Hartmann's concept of the conflict-free ego sphere expresses this formulation. This leads to the hypothesis that there must be a period in human development in which the ego is as yet undifferentiated from the id. If one returns to the question of what conflicted with the drives, it should be remembered that the motor, perceptual and memory apparatuses all have definite thresholds which are their structural characteristics. These thresholds set limits to the discharge possibilities of the drive tensions. The existence of inborn structural elements in the undifferentiated phase may be what precipitates developmentally the differentiation into the ego and the id. 'The developing ego … integrates these structural apparatuses and re-represents their discharge-limiting and -regulating function in forms usually described as defenses. These are the foundations of the primary a