The author questions the psychoanalytic assumption that the id does not have a specific organization. Beyond the objective real world constituted by the ego within the drive-autonomous sphere of representation and beyond the archaic ego processes that Freud subsumed under the primary process, there exists an id form of reality conception which is not logically accountable. This conception is closely related to the communication of animals and is characterized by the expressive gestures and release mechanisms discovered by ethology. The purpose of this phylogenetically acquired and hereditarily fixed reality conception is self-preservation. The unbridgeable chasm between the two forms of organization—between 'understanding' and 'explanation'—comes about as a result of the divergence between the developmental schedules of