ABSTRACT
This chapter expresses that the basic layers of the personality are born out of the early interplay between the infant and the mother. It explores that the vital satisfactions the mother gives to the infant are crucial for early development, but the ideas about how the primordial ego, the body ego, is formed out of these satisfactions are spread amongst many different kinds of theories and unintegrated clinical and empirical observations. The chapter also expresses that the vital processes connected with a fusion of infant and mother, taking place first and foremost in breast-feeding, form the nuclear events which precipitate the birth and development of the body ego. Conceptualizing the ego first and foremost as a body ego was a central part of Sigmund Freud's formulations when he delineated the structural theory. Lack of love and good handling in infancy create a predisposition at the level of the body ego to a psychotic breakdown of the primal self-object representations.
