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In the second Chapter, which dealt almost exclusively with the work of Sigmund Freud, I showed how his painstaking adherence to the psycho-analytical method of investigation gradually, indeed over the entire span of 45 years of work, led to serial revision of concepts of the development of personality. While his training and era disposed him to think in terms of energy (instincts) and their control or modification (vicissitudes), his discoveries with patients confronted him with evidence about structure and organisation. Psychoanalysis, as a theoretical branch of psychology, finally took its present form in 1923 when, with the publication of “The Ego and the Id”, Freud gave specific significance to the term “meta-psychology” as the special province of psycho-analysis, examining the human personality from four viewpoints: its development (genetic aspect), its structure (earlier called the topographic aspect), its mechanisms of operation (dynamic aspect) and its disposition of psychic “energy” (economic aspect).
While in the previous Chapter we followed Freud's views of childhood sexuality through to the time of his death in 1939, we more or less stopped about 1911 as regards the evolution of his view on the structural aspect of personality development in children. Even in the 1905 edition of the “Three Essays on Sexuality” he recognised phases of erogenous-zone-primacy, the mouth, anus, genitals. But these were viewed as leading zones either in object relations (allo-erotic) or for auto-erotic gratification. His conception was that these zones, or fixation to them, served as foci of the crystallisation of the pathological conflicts which in adult life would give rise to neuroses and psychoses.
In 1913, in the paper “The Disposition of Obsessional Neurosis” he writes: “To begin with, I had only distinguished, first the phase of auto-erotism, during which the subject's component instincts, each on its own account” (i.e., devoid of organisation) “seek for the satisfaction