ABSTRACT
The formation of a cohesive schema does not mark the completion of the maturational sequence of the self-organization. On the contrary, this stage of the epigenesis merely forms the basis of an ongoing process of continuing rearrangements within the hierarchy of goals and values. The achievement of a cohesive hierarchy of personal aims coincides with the child’s realization of his actual dependence on his caretakers. The idealization of the parent probably takes place when the child becomes capable of conceiving of another person as an autonomous individual, roughly at the time he forms a unified self-schema. The clinical evidence for the developmental conclusions comes from the analytic treatment of patients whose overall personality organization suffers from an arrest of development at a very archaic phase.
