ABSTRACT
To introduce some order into the vast domain of the egoinstincts, their erotic component appears to provide a suitable basis of classification. At one end of the line would come ego-functions which cause little or no erotic pleasure; at the other end such functions as one would hesitate to count as ego rather than as sexual functions. To sum up: the pre-condition of adaptation is the erotisation of the ego-instincts! Such erotisation is continued as long as the work of adaptation lasts. Then the erotic component is gradually detached (probably in order to be used somewhere else), and parallel with it the ego-function in question loses its educability, it becomes rigid, automatic, like a reflex. There is, however, a kind of phenomena which can be used to prove the erotisation of an ego-function as the prerequisite for its adaptation: the still hotly contested psychoanalytic therapy of organic illnesses.
