You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This comprehensive survey reviews the literature and contains some of the author's own contributions on the nature and functions of the id, the 'primitive' ego, and the 'abstract' ego. Goldberger examines the id's quality of awareness, and its relation to the body, emotion, perception, muscle action, repression, and dreams. He suggests that man's nonverbal mind corresponds to the id. The 'primitive ego' is emotional and verbal, functioning in primitive people, infants, young children, schizophrenics, and patients with various organic pathological states. He illustrates ego functions of perception, thought, action, the concept of space, the defenses against anxiety, the body image, the role and nature of shame, the nature of symbols. The primitive ego uses words to express a relationship between two visual sensory images; it lives both in the real world and in the world of magic. By contrast, the 'mature abstract verbal ego is a higher development, rarely achieved'. This part of the ego is aware of the self as subject, it can think abstractly without emotion; Goldberger believes that one can think abstractly only if the culture possesses a written language. Anxiety is not present in the abstract ego, but 'guilt plays an important role'. The ego is thus phylogenetically and culturally determined. The absence of guilt in the primitive ego is due to unawareness of the self as subject. Guilt is 'a characteristic of the highest mind of man, the abstract ego, and is therefore one of the last mechanisms to develop'. Dreams are a manifestation of the id, the primitive ego, and the abstract ego; the author believes that the abstract freudian concept of symbols in dreams or myths is fallacious. He lays major stress on the role of kinesthetic sensation in the development of reality sense and functioning. Implications for the treatment of schizophrenia and of neurosis, with special reference to the role of language, are discussed in considerable detail.