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The need for investigating the relationship of ego functions to character structure and symptomatology was stressed by Freud, and more recently by many other psychoanalysts (2), (9), (1), (5), (7), (8). As Waelder (13) said, 'It is one of the tasks of our ego psychology to develop an alphabet of defense mechanisms, a catalogue of elementary responses'. We report here a systematic investigation of ego functions as they appear in the final result of the dream work and elaboration, namely, the manifest dream. The ego gives the unconscious material a shape which is not too unacceptable to the ego (the secondary elaboration) (3). Hence the result, the manifest dream, is excellent for studying the ego activities, especially its unconscious activities.
In attempting to isolate the essential elements of the ego's activities and to classify them, in our study we utilize Freud's formulation of repression (4) by the ego at the behest of the superego; thus we avoid for the present the complication of distinguishing ego from superego functions and examine, as did Anna Freud, the ego and its defenses. We avoid the several uses of the term repression (6) while retaining the premise fundamental to all, that of withholding from consciousness. Traveling Freud's 'royal road' to the unconscious, we explore initially the functions of the ego as exemplified in dreams. Ten categories of ego functions in dreams are differentiated. In each category four subgroups list differing degrees of ego awareness