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The author surveys Freud's views on early psychic functioning by reviewing the theoretical constructs and formulations in his papers from a three-fold viewpoint: 1, the innate data and initial conditions of this earliest period; 2, the theories dealing with instinctual drives, ego development, and the resulting psychic contents; 3, separation of the ideal models of earlier psychic functioning inferable from these hypotheses. Throughout his presentation the author underscores the significance of the change from passivity to activity as a general principle of ego development and the central element in the unfolding of psychic structure.
Freud's central contribution to the theory of earliest mental functioning is the concept of the instinctual drives and their epigenesis as innate givens which serve as the nuclei around which experiences organize. He postulated inborn apparatuses for both drive discharge and drive restraint in his references to channels or pathways of affective discharge and to thresholds respectively. He regarded affects and consciousness as innate involvements in earliest psychic functioning.
Freud attributed inhibitory tendencies to the experiences of conflict between the instinctual drives and external reality, and a gradual differentiation of drives, restraints, and structures from the internalization of the conflicts. The drive-inhibiting structures can develop too early or be excessively strengthened by experiences with resulting fixation at, or regression to, early zonal position. The experiences of frustration and deprivation constitute an essential condition for the ability to distinguish between inner and outer reality; i.e., ego from object. In the process of differentiation of the self and the object a 'purified pleasure ego' prevails and introjects everything pleasurable, while it ejects everything painful; hate plays a specially significant role, particularly in the distinction of self from nonself. The system perceptual consciousn