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The Birth of the Ego recapitulates in dry, sophisticated, and crusty prose some of Edward Glover's speculations on the beginnings of mental life in the child. Glover's reputation is perhaps most widely established as a peppery defender of basic freudian tenets and a promulgator of sound methodology. His theoretical formulations are nonetheless cogent for having arisen partly as by-products of his polemical writings; for example, his demonstration that Melanie Klein confuses mechanism (e.g., introjection and projection, concepts which belong to the realm of metapsychology) with fantasy (a descriptive concept belonging to clinical theory). Glover's ideas have evolved, like the ego itself, in conflict.
In a footnote to his paper on the Klein system of child psychology, Glover writes: 'From the time I first published some observations on the oral phase of the libido development [1924], my main theoretical and clinical interests were devoted to attempted reconstructions of early stages of ego development [and] to the correlation of these stages with different forms of mental disorder'. In the same footnote he says: 'For a time I set myself the task of trying to find a compromise between Kleinian and Freudian concepts'. This resulted in a paper, Grades of Ego-Differentiation, in which he invokes introjective and projective mechanisms (reminiscent of Klein) in the laying down of ego-nuclei.
For some years he supported Klein's general conclusions. 'But as time went on', he says, 'it was impossible to keep my misgivings from creeping into public comment on her work'. Thus, in an important sense, it could be said that from an early stage in its development Glover's conception of ego-nuclei represented his effort to cope with the incursions of Kleinian theory on orthodox psychoanalytic thinking. He points out, however, that the concept actually first came to him in relation to Abraham's idea of part objects: 'If indeed there are part objects, and as there certainly