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Recently Paul Kramer (1955) has focused attention on a developmental phase of which comparatively little seems to be known. K. R. Eissler (1950), in an earlier study, had already spoken of a stage in the child's development "which can be called the discovery of the ego" and had stated: "Comparable to the phase in which the child discovers that there is an outer world and familiarizes himself with it, there must be a developmental phase in which the child discovers that 'he' is 'he' which means that there is not only an outer world but also an ego as a distinct entity."
Johnny, a little boy of two years and ten months, who was watching his one-year-old brother Charlie crawling on the floor, succinctly expressed it this way: "Charlie is a Charlie, daddy is a daddy, mummy is a mummy, grandma is a grandma, Johnny is a Johnny." It was not coincidental, perhaps, that the child, while slowly enumerating and emphatically identifying the population of his immediate environment, mentioned his own name last, thus possibly indicating that the discovery of himself as a separate entity was preceded by that of the significant persons around him.
More specifically, Kramer's interesting case report deals with the emergence, in analysis, of an isolated, separate ego segment, termed by his patient the "little man," which had persisted throughout his life. The analytic penetration of the patient's earliest memories and fantasies enabled Kramer to demonstrate in some detail how this part of the ego came into being, under the influence of certain traumatic events in childhood, and how it continued to lead "a sort of autonomous existence," unchanged and unmodified, as an ego part separated from the rest of the personality. Because of the scarcity of such observations in the literature, it may be of interest to present a comparable case. Though some features of the case to be described appear rather similar to those observed by Kramer, a number of differences in the psychopathology wi