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The author describes the ego, stressing the importance of identifications in its formation. 'Often it is forgotten … that these identifications or parts of the ego can be repressed and can then play an important role in the creation of psychopathological phenomena.' Clinical evidence supports this point. In one case, what seemed to be oral dependency on the mother was found later to be a partial ego identification with a frustrating parent. Therefore 'the interpretation of [the patient's] behavior as repeating an infantile identification [with one of the parents] was more dynamically valuable than regarding the ego as a "unit" reacting to the presence of the mother'. This emphasis in interpretation 'sometimes permits a more genetically comprehensive view of character traits and of ego organization of a complicated nature such as obsessional neurosis or phobic mechanisms'. There is also need for prolonged analysis of the factors which produced the 'internalizations' as well as of the 'repression of bad objects'. 'This externalization of the bad objects, which means, so to speak, the transformation of a depressive situation into a paranoid one, is possible only when the patient's ego has been helped by the introjection of the analyst as an "unconditional" good object.'