ABSTRACT
A few psychoanalytic writers have asked themselves whether it might be possible to conceive of a rudimentary "ego" that would operate even before birth, and Hartmann suggested that "certain dispositions for future ego functions" may already be present "at birth". Psychoanalysts interested in this kind of research will presumably prefer to work in reverse by trying to see whether, in addition to other possible contributory factors, patients who have shown signs of severe ego impairment can sometimes later be found to have a placental history and whether, within certain limits some degree of correlation can be established between the former and the latter. At a postnatal level, it had been possible in retrospect to see the author intervening for the author's patient in this way as a piece of countertransference acting out in which the author had stepped into the role of a supportive but somewhat ineffectual mother.
