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In the last few years a great deal of work is being done in order to shed some light on the earliest mental processes. The Symposia published 1950 and 1952 in This Annual reflect the approach and the points of view of the various authors.
Anna Freud (1953), in her paper "Some Remarks on Infant Observation," elaborates on Freud's concept of the pleasure ego. She vividly describes how the young infant does not differentiate between himself and the outside world. Under the influence of the pleasure principle, the infant builds a "pleasure ego": what is pleasant is considered to be himself, what is painful is considered to be outside himself. While on the mother's lap, he does not know where he himself ends and the environment begins. Even in the second year, children may still occasionally behave with their mothers as if their two bodies were one. A child who likes to suck his thumb will suddenly take the mother's thumb instead of his own; or, while feeding, will put the spoon into his mother's mouth.
One may surmise that what goes on on the mental side of the newborn are the contrasting feelings of pleasure and pain. It is on the strength of these sensations and of their contrasting nature that the infant organizes what he will later feel to be his self. Only through the painful experience of losing his mother periodically does the child learn, very gradually in the course of the first year, that the big pleasure self he believes to be his own is not all his own. Parts of it walk away from him and become environment, while others remain with him for ever.
Hoffer (1950), in "Development of the Body Ego," points out, as a