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A study group of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Institute presents in this book the results of its psychoanalytic investigation of foetal psychic life. It is impossible to do justice in a brief review to the abundance of clinical evidence presented. Current psychoanalytic literature on ego development is thoroughly discussed. The ideas presented may be summarized as follows.
The superego and the Oedipus complex have roots unmentioned in most psychoanalytic studies. The instincts also cannot be understood unless we take note of inborn elements that give them some of their intensity. These inborn elements are object representations of the foetal ego. At birth the death instinct loses its original objects, the umbilical supplies, and therefore becomes more intense and potentially very threatening. Hence, the death instinct threatens to destory the ego, and the ego is forced to attempt to free itself from destructive pressure by finding external objects on which to project these hostile elements. The ego is free of need for an external object until the umbilical supply is cut because there is no need for any acknowledgement of reality. Thus the foetal ego is totally independent of any external object. This isolation from reality explains the exclusive and characteristic relation of the foetal ego to inherited or internal object representations. Here we find the economic basis of the nirvana principle. These internal inherited objects were supposed by Freud to exist in the id. Accordingly the id is the storage place for all psychic inherited experiences and the ego will in the future derive its evaluations and identifications from this storage place.
In the primary mental contents exist representations and charges of energy. The representations in the unconscious are of a plastic character, resembling two-dimensional images. Perception of the relation of the self to objects begins with this bi-dimensional internal image. Prenatal objects are philogenetic psyc