The author highlights some aspects of symptoms and character traits, especially from the more recently developed structural-dynamic point of view. Conflict among the drives, ego, superego, and outside world takes place in health as well as in pathology, but only in health is the ego able to integrate and harmonize the conflicting interests. This capacity of the ego develops out of innate properties in connection with the other ego functions, in the interplay with the development of the instinctual drives, and is influenced by object relationships, the environment at large, and the nature of the superego and ego ideal. Symptoms develop when the ego cannot synthesize the demands of the id, superego, and environment without the pathological use of defense. Character traits are formed as precipitates of mental processes that come into existence in the mutual interplay of ego, id, superego, and ego ideal under the influence of object relations and environment.