ABSTRACT
To continue the exploration of interactive constructs and propositions, if one thinks for a moment of the study of development as a mountain and psychoanalysis as a tunnel to be made through it, then the digging may be started with either the object or the ‘I’, the ego. Eventually the two are likely to meet. In fact, in the history of psychoanalysis they have met many times, beginning with Freud’s concepts of identification and of the internalization of an object relation within the ego. It is no accident that one of the earliest essays on the ego was Freud’s ‘Group Psychology the Analysis of the Ego’.
