Maynard in this book has set about to study the ego as can be determined by conscious introspection. He constantly draws a line between what can be determined by study of one's mental, controlling processes and those activities of the mental apparatus that lie outside the conscious awareness of the self-observing ego. Thus he approaches many ego functions descriptively but stops short at a self-imposed barrier to state that this leads beyond the scope of his study and belongs to the 'other' part of the mental apparatus. He implies that he is intensely aware of the existence of unconscious portions of the ego, and of other mental systems, by his use of terms