ABSTRACT
The various elements of experience, spread out across the surface of life, generate a field of forces through which the interconnected ego becomes aware of itself, and represents itself, as a distinctive form. At the same time these energetic flows tend to deform and dissolve the ego, breaking into its precarious inner unity and returning its constituent parts to an elemental primary process. The temporary morphological unity of the ego is not itself the outcome of rational or intentional actions, nor is it the product of reflection and intellectual operations, which, in fact, become possible only as aspects of its emergence. Equally, however, the ego cannot be conceived in terms of a self-generating dynamism; as a Romantic soul. Freud’s understanding of the characteristic deformations of the ego, observable in neurotic symptoms and more commonly in dreams, led him towards a general view of psychical functioning in which fantasy played a central role. However, every effort to uncover an ‘originating cause’ from which sprang the entire process of inner self-development succeeded only in revealing a fantasy which had been carried back to this inconceivable point of indifference as a ready-made explanation of its own subsequent metamorphoses.
