ABSTRACT
The fact that in recent years psycho-analysts have neglected the concept of a mental apparatus is due to a number of causes some of which cannot be distinguished from resistances. The tendency to anthropomorphize the mental apparatus, to personalize its parts and functions, was accelerated by the circumstance that Freud's original and mainly dynamic concept of the apparatus was considerably overlaid by his later expansions of structural psychology. This emphasis on ego-psychology has given rise during the past ten to fifteen years to attempts to describe early functional phases of the mental apparatus in terms of organized ego-institutions; or, to put the matter simply, to attribute to the suckling the conscious mentality and unconscious organization of a four-year-old child. The authors can identify the primary functional phase of the mental apparatus with the period of 'primary identification' which includes the most primitive forms of object relationships and which is maintained largely by the mechanisms of regression and by commencing projections.
