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What I put before you today is an attempt to account for some aspects of schizophrenia in terms of the impairment not so much of "the ego," as of specific ego functions. I tried to integrate, or more modestly, to account for, certain well-known data about schizophrenic defense, object relations, language, reality testing, and so on. This was done from one point of view, but not exclusive of different ways to approach the problem. While I abstracted, for the purpose of this presentation, one aspect, I repeat here what I said before, that its meaning is fully realized only in its interrelations with others. That many aspects of schizophrenia cannot be really understood unless we approach them in terms of metapsychology, has been clearly stated by Glover (1949). The metapsychological hypotheses I used allowed me at least partly to bridge the gap between the instinctual and the ego aspects of schizophrenic psychosis, and to establish some connections between the one and the other. They gave me some insights into the economy particularly of aggression and into its role in the normal as well as in the schizophrenic individual. And they led me to some conjectures about the problem that is for many of us in the foreground of interest: the predisposition to schizophrenia. Some of the clinical phenomena that can be explained in the framework of these hypotheses will also be discussed at this symposium by Dr. Bak.15 In a paper like this one, with its operational, or heuristic, one-sidedness, we are of necessity confronted with a large number of question marks surrounding an island of tentative propositions; but I think I am safe in saying that the hypotheses I suggested are at least not in contradiction with empirical data, or with the main body of tested psychoanalytic theory.