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THE ROLE OF THE BODY AND ITS FUNCTIONS IN THE PSYCHIC life of the individual consistently occupied a central place in the psychoanalytic thinking and writing of Anna Freud. The centrality of the body and its functions in her thinking is clearly evident in her concept of developmental lines. In discussing some developmental lines toward body independence, she stresses that "the ego of an individual begins first and foremost as a body ego"1 and, in contrast to autoerotic gratifications, "the processes of feeding, sleeping, evacuation, body hygiene, and prevention of injury and illness have to undergo complex and lengthy developments before they become the growing individual's own concern" (1965, p. 68f.).
Developmentally, the body and the ego as a psychic organization have an integral, mutual relationship. As a psychic organization the ego arises by differentiation from the id via the experience of the body in the Pcpt.-Cs. Freud (1923) emphasized that: