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The author gives his observations on early ego development using Fairbairn's outline of human psychological development and structure as the basis for an inquiry into the nature of the events or structures he is describing.
Markillie believes that Fairbairn's isolation from the mainstream of British psychoanalysis has enabled him to think more originally than he might otherwise have done; however, this isolation has also had its negative results. This is evident in his technique and in his tendency to make too great a distinction between personal and biological and between therapeutic and scientific. The author attempts to redefine the term 'personal' and to explore the confusion between the psychological and biological at the beginning of human life. He believes that a study of this earliest period of ego development will bring about an integration of views between those who are convinced of the primacy of inheritance and those who favor the importance of the environment and nurture; and between those who advocate learning theories and the importance of conditioning and those who prefer the unlearned components of behavior.
He expounds his concepts further by taking two of Fairbairn's postulates as the point of departure for his discussion: 1, 'The pristine personality of the child consists of a unitary dynamic ego'; and 2, 'The first defense adopted by the original ego to deal with an unsatisfying personal relationship is mental internalization or introjection of the unsatisfying object'. In criticism of the second postulate, he points out the generally accepted point of view that introjection of the good object is an important part of normal ego development but is not sufficiently recognized by Fairbairn. Further discussion, criticism, and modification of Fairbairn's concepts complete the paper.