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I have a great appreciation for Gustav Bychowski's therapeutic skill in dealing with such severely disturbed patients; my own work with them is limited. My basic ideas concerning the construction of the internal world and intrapsychic conflict are very different from Bychowski's conceptualizations. Let me indicate sketchily some points of divergence.
In “The Internal World,” the last chapter of his Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud (1940) made a principal distinction between the external and the internal worlds of children. The objects of the child are initially located in the external world. But at the end of the oedipal phase, an important change takes place. Freud states:
A portion of the external world has, at least partially, been abandoned as an object and has instead, by identification, been taken into the ego and thus become an integral part of the internal world. This new psychical agency continues to carry on the functions which have hitherto been performed by the people [the abandoned objects] in the external world … [p. 205].
Sandler and Rosenblatt (1962) comment that Freud used the terms external and internal in a descriptive sense. However, I believe we must take into account that perception of objects in the external world takes place concomitantly with the organization of the intrapsychic representations of that external reality. Thus we have to go beyond the purely descriptive differentiation between external and internal. This raises the question of the development and organization of the representations within the ego of the child from a metapsychological point of view: “… perception is an active process by means of which the ego transforms raw sensory data into meaningful percepts” (Sandler and Rosenblatt, 1962, pp. 131-132).
In addition, psychoanalytic observations lead to the assumption that there is a phase, perhaps in the first few weeks after birth,
when sensory impressions, gratification-tension, are not yet organized as consistent and meani