This essay examines Freud's structural model of the psyche through a developmental lens, exploring how early ego formation in adverse environments creates lasting patterns that resist traditional therapeutic interventions. By mapping psychoanalytic concepts onto observable developmental milestones and introducing accessible metaphors for complex psychological processes, this work bridges theoretical understanding with practical application for practitioners in child protection, family support, and therapeutic services. Particular attention is given to preverbal trauma, structural dissociation, and the implications for contemporary practice with families experiencing persistent dysfunction.
Practitioners working in family safeguarding repeatedly encounter a confounding phenomenon: families who understand what they need to change, want to change, yet remain locked in destructive patterns. Parents attend programmes, engage with services, articulate insights about their difficulties, yet crisis continues to cycle through their homes with devastating predictability. Traditional interventions, particularly those relying on cognitive understanding and verbal processing, often fail to create lasting change. This essay proposes that the key to understanding these intractable cases lies in examining the preverbal period of ego formation—those crucial months before language when the basic architecture of self is established in response to environmental conditions.
Freud's structural model of the psyche—the id, ego, and superego—whilst over a century old, offers profound insights when viewed through the lens of contemporary developmental psychology and trauma theory. This essay will demonstrate how the ego's formation during the preverbal period, particularly in harsh or dangerous environments, creates adaptive structures that become maladaptive in later life, resistant to verbal intervention, and generationally transmitted through parenting patterns.
Before proceeding, it is essential to acknowledge both the value and limitations of Freud's work. Freud's scientific method was considerably more insular than modern research standards would permit. He worked primarily from his own clinical observations, often with limited peer review, and displayed what might charitably be called "interpretive confidence" in drawing conclusions from sparse or ambiguous data. The infamous "Little Hans" case exemplifies this: Freud concluded that a five-year-old boy's fear of white horses represented castration anxiety related to Oedipal conflict with his father, despite the fact that the boy had witnessed a distressing accident involving a horse and cart. When Hans described his fear that the horse might bite him, Freud heard confirmation of his castration theory rather than what the child was actually communicating—that he had seen a large animal's distressing behaviour and was frightened. The boy was recounting a traumatic event; Freud was hearing symbolic sexual anxiety. This interpretive leap—from a child's understandable fear following a frightening experience to elaborate unconscious fantasies about paternal punishment—demonstrates how theoretical precommitment can override clinical listening (Freud, 1909).
This pattern—of allowing theoretical precommitment to override clinical observation—recurred throughout Freud's later work. His increasing dogmatism, resistance to criticism, and tendency to interpret all evidence as confirming his theories would be considered methodologically unsound by contemporary standards. The abandonment of his "seduction theory" (which recognised childhood sexual abuse as traumatic) in favour of the Oedipus complex (which reinterpreted patients' reports as fantasies) represents perhaps his most consequential error, one that delayed recognition of childhood sexual abuse for decades (Masson, 1984).
In this sense, Freud resembles certain pioneering artists whose early innovative work established entirely new possibilities, whilst their later output became increasingly self-referential and detached from the creative vitality that made their early contributions significant. Paul McCartney's groundbreaking work with The Beatles and his innovative early solo period through Wings in the early 1970s established new territory in popular music, yet much of his subsequent work, whilst technically competent, lacks the innovative spark of those earlier years. Similarly, Brian Wilson's revolutionary production techniques and compositional sophistication on albums like Pet Sounds and Smile represented genuine artistic breakthroughs, whilst his later struggles with mental health and creative direction produced work of more variable quality. These later limitations do not negate the importance of their seminal contributions—but neither should admiration for early innovation blind us to later weaknesses.
Freud's structural model—the id, ego, and superego—represents such an early innovation. Developed in the 1920s, it provided a framework for understanding internal conflict, developmental process, and the relationship between biological drives and social constraints. The model's essential insight—that personality develops through interaction between innate drives and environmental demands, creating internal structures that mediate this relationship—remains valid. However, Freud's specific claims about psychosexual stages, the Oedipus complex as universal, and the primacy of sexual drives have not withstood empirical scrutiny.
This essay therefore treats Freud's structural model as a starting point rather than received truth. We draw upon the framework's core insights whilst integrating contemporary attachment theory, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and trauma research. Where Freud's observations align with modern evidence, we acknowledge this convergence. Where his interpretations were limited by his theoretical precommitments or methodological insularity, we adapt and extend the framework using better evidence.
The value in returning to Freud is not reverence for historical authority but recognition that his clinical observations—particularly regarding internal conflict, defensive processes, and developmental influence—identified genuine phenomena, even when his explanations were incomplete or inaccurate. By grounding his structural model in contemporary developmental timelines and neurobiological understanding, we can rescue valuable insights from methodological limitations, creating a framework that serves practitioners encountering the complex realities of family dysfunction.
Freud's original conception of the id, ego, and superego (Freud, 1923) described these as functional divisions of the psyche, but was less explicit about their developmental emergence. Contemporary understanding, informed by infant observation and neurodevelopmental research, allows us to map these structures onto observable milestones, creating a framework that practitioners can recognise in their daily work.
The id, present from birth, represents what Freud termed "a cauldron full of seething excitations" (Freud, 1933, p. 73). However, rather than viewing it as merely chaotic, we can understand the id as unorganised potential—the raw material of personality awaiting structure. This reformulation aligns with Winnicott's (1960) concept of the "unintegrated state" of early infancy, where experiences exist without coherent organisation.
To make this concept accessible, we might visualise the id as the colour of a gingerbread figure—present, essential, but without form or boundary. Alternatively, imagine plastic balls in a ball pool without the containing walls—energy and potential scattered without functional purpose. These metaphors capture what Bion (1962) described as "beta elements"—raw sensory and emotional data awaiting transformation into usable mental content.
The ego, according to Freud (1923), develops from the id through contact with external reality, operating on what he termed the "reality principle." Whilst Freud was imprecise about timing, we can map this emergence onto a crucial developmental milestone: independent mobility, typically emerging around 9 months.
When an infant begins to crawl, they encounter reality in an entirely new way. Objects are no longer simply presented by caregivers but must be navigated toward, around, or away from. The id's raw desire—"want that"—meets environmental constraint—"can't reach" or "mother says no." This repeated encounter between desire and reality necessitates the development of mediating structures.
Returning to our metaphors: the ego is the outline of the gingerbread figure, giving shape to the colour. It is the walls of the ball pool, containing and directing the energy of the balls so they can be engaged with purposefully rather than scattering chaotically. As Freud noted, "the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world" (1923, p. 25).
Contemporary infant research supports this timeline. Stern's (1985) work on the "emergent self" identifies 7-9 months as a crucial period when infants demonstrate clear awareness of their own agency and begin to differentiate self from other. Stern emphasised that the developmental challenge during this period involves both mother and infant emotionally and physically completing their separation from each other—a process that requires the infant to develop ego boundaries while the mother must allow and support this individuation. (Crucially, the reciprocal play between mother and child that begins much earlier, typically around 3 months, establishes the foundation for this developmental step—the infant must first experience connection before they can safely separate.) The development of object permanence, typically emerging around 8-9 months (Piaget, 1954), allows the infant to hold mental representations—a capacity fundamental to ego functioning.
The ego's primary task is not suppression of the id but organisation and channeling. A healthy ego provides structure that makes the id's energy usable. The infant who can crawl to a desired toy, manipulate it, and explore its properties is demonstrating early ego function—the transformation of raw want into purposeful action.
The superego's emergence is traditionally placed later in Freud's theory, around 3-5 years during the resolution of the Oedipus complex (Freud, 1923). However, contemporary developmental research suggests earlier proto-superego formation coinciding with language acquisition, typically around 18 months.
Freud described the superego as the "heir to the Oedipus complex" (1923, p. 36), formed through identification with parental figures. However, we can understand this process beginning earlier through the mechanism of language. When a toddler hears repeated patterns—"no touching," "gentle hands," "we don't hit"—these verbal structures begin forming internal templates that precede full superego development.
In our gingerbread metaphor, the superego represents the features—eyes, mouth, buttons—that give the figure expression and character. In the ball pool analogy, it is the posted rules and boundaries that further organise play within the contained space. The superego adds another layer of structure to the ego-bounded id.
This earlier timeline for proto-superego formation has significant implications. If moral and behavioural templates begin forming at 18 months, they do so largely through absorption of parental communication patterns rather than conscious teaching. The tone, consistency, and emotional valence of early limit-setting become internalised as the superego's "voice."
Melanie Klein's (1935) work on the early superego, describing it as harsh and punitive in young children, aligns with observations that toddlers often apply rules rigidly and become distressed by minor transgressions. This rigidity gradually softens in healthy development, but in adverse environments, the harsh early superego may persist, creating the foundation for later self-criticism and shame-based regulation.
We can now construct a developmental timeline:
Birth to 9 months: Id phase—unorganised energy and potential
9 to 18 months: Ego formation—structure develops through environmental encounter
18 months onward: Superego emergence—internalised rules and values begin forming
This timeline allows practitioners to ask crucial assessment questions:
What was the infant's environment during ego formation (9-18 months)?
What communication patterns were present during early superego development (18-24 months)?
Were there disruptions, trauma, or inconsistency during these critical windows?
The ego's primary developmental task is enabling the infant to engage with their environment safely and effectively. Freud recognised that "the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego" (1923, p. 26), grounded in physical experience and sensory boundaries. The ego must assess environmental conditions and adapt accordingly—a sophisticated protective mechanism operating largely outside conscious awareness.
In a "good enough" environment (Winnicott, 1953), where caregivers are generally responsive and the physical environment is safe, the ego can develop with optimal flexibility. Like the walls of a ball pool made from soft, flexible material, the ego boundaries are firm enough to contain and organise id energy but permeable enough to allow exchange with the environment. The infant learns that expressing needs generally brings relief, that exploration is encouraged, that mistakes are tolerated.
However, when the environment is harsh, unpredictable, or dangerous, the ego must adapt differently. The walls must become harder, higher, more rigid to protect the vulnerable id-self within.
When an infant experiences consistent environmental threat—whether through physical danger, emotional unpredictability, or caregiver absence—the developing ego responds with increased defensive structuring. This process operates through several mechanisms:
Heightened vigilance: The ego develops what Perry (2006) describes as a "hyperaroused" baseline state, constantly scanning for threat. This vigilance, whilst adaptive in dangerous environments, becomes exhausting and limiting in safe contexts.
Restricted permeability: A healthy ego boundary is semi-permeable, allowing appropriate exchange with the environment. A traumatised ego becomes more impermeable—less able to take in new information, less responsive to relational cues, more defended against potential hurt. Bowlby's (1973) description of avoidant attachment captures this: the infant learns that seeking comfort brings further distress, so the ego structure walls off attachment needs. In practice, this manifests as what might be termed "commando-style raids" for essential needs—the child approaches the harsh or rejecting parent just long enough to secure basic survival requirements (food, warmth, bodily contact, nappy change, relative safety even if not actual safety), then quickly withdraws to emotional and physical distance. The child learns to get needs met whilst minimising exposure to relational pain, creating an ego structure that permits functional proximity but prevents genuine emotional connection.
Premature consolidation: Ego development ideally proceeds gradually, allowing for ongoing adaptation. In harsh environments, the ego may consolidate prematurely into rigid patterns because consistency—even painful consistency—is more manageable than unpredictability. The child with chaotic caregiving may develop a rigidly self-reliant ego structure because it's safer than hoping for responsive care.
Somatic embedding: Because ego formation occurs during the preverbal period, these adaptations are encoded somatically rather than cognitively. Levine (2010) describes how threat responses become "procedural memories" in the body—automatic muscular bracing, breath restriction, hyperarousal patterns that persist long after the original danger has passed.
Returning to our metaphors: the gingerbread figure's outline becomes thick and hardened, like overcooked gingerbread that loses all flexibility. The ball pool's walls transform from flexible plastic to rigid steel—initially protective, ultimately limiting. The balls (id energy) within have less room to move, less opportunity for playful exploration.
Here lies the tragic paradox: the very ego structure that enables the infant to survive a harsh environment becomes the limitation preventing them from thriving when circumstances improve. The rigidity that protected the vulnerable self in infancy becomes the prison confining the adult.
Consider a parent raised in an unpredictable, sometimes violent household. Their childhood ego developed rigid boundaries: don't ask for help, don't show vulnerability, maintain constant control. These patterns enabled survival. But in adulthood, parenting their own children, this rigid ego structure prevents the flexibility needed for responsive parenting. They cannot tolerate their child's emotional intensity because their own id was so severely contained. They cannot provide comfort because accepting comfort was dangerous in their own development.
This parent understands intellectually that children need warmth and responsiveness. They want to provide it. But their rigid ego structure, formed before language and operating through somatic patterns, prevents this understanding from translating into action.
Practitioners can recognise rigid ego structures through several indicators:
All-or-nothing responses: The parent who oscillates between complete control and complete collapse, unable to modulate response.
Somatic presentations: Chronic muscular tension, restricted breathing, limited emotional range expressed through the body.
Relationship patterns: Difficulty accepting support, hypervigilance in interactions, resistance to vulnerability.
Parenting challenges: Particular difficulty with infant neediness, toddler autonomy, or child emotionality—developmental stages that trigger the parent's own unresolved ego formation period.
Response to intervention: Understanding concepts intellectually but unable to implement them practically—the hallmark of preverbal limitation resisting verbal intervention.
Rigid ego structures tend to perpetuate across generations through several mechanisms:
Modelling: Children absorb their parents' relational patterns through observation and experience, forming their own ego boundaries in response to what they encounter.
Environmental recreation: Parents with rigid egos often recreate the conditions that formed their own structure—harsh control, emotional unavailability, or chaotic inconsistency.
Attachment transmission: Avoidant parents create avoidant children, not through genetics but through the relational environment shaping early ego formation.
Unresolved trauma: When parents' own preverbal trauma remains unprocessed, it leaks into their parenting through somatic responses, emotional unavailability, or frightening behaviour that recreates "fear without solution" for their children.
This transmission is not inevitable—attachment research demonstrates that parents can develop "earned security" through therapeutic work (Pearson et al., 1994). However, such change requires addressing the somatic and relational level where the original ego structure formed, not simply cognitive understanding of parenting principles.
We have explored how harsh environments create rigid ego structures—but what happens when environmental stress exceeds even rigid defences' capacity to protect? When the ego boundaries cannot hold, they rupture.
Using our gingerbread metaphor: if the figure is overcooked enough, the outline doesn't just harden—it cracks. In severe cases, portions break off entirely. Similarly, in the ball pool analogy, if force against the walls exceeds their structural integrity, they rupture, and the balls scatter in uncontained chaos.
Psychological rupture occurs when experience overwhelms the ego's capacity to organise, contain, and integrate it. This is trauma in its purest form—not merely a frightening event but an experience that shatters the structures meant to process experience.
Whilst discrete traumatic events can rupture established ego structures, we are particularly concerned here with developmental trauma—ongoing adverse conditions during the period when ego boundaries are forming (9-18 months). This represents the most profound form of ego damage because the structure is ruptured whilst it is still forming.
Schore (1994, 2003) describes this process neurobiologically: chronic stress during early development disrupts right-brain maturation, impairing the infant's capacity to regulate affect and integrate experience. The ego, which Freud recognised as "first and foremost a bodily ego" (1923, p. 26), depends on these neurological capacities for its formation. When neurodevelopment is compromised, ego formation is compromised.
Examples of developmental conditions creating ego rupture include:
Severely neglectful care: The infant's needs go consistently unmet, providing no template for organising experience or trusting environmental responsiveness.
Frightening or dissociative caregiving: The primary attachment figure becomes a source of terror or demonstrates dissociative behaviour, creating "fear without solution" (Main & Hesse, 1990) that cannot be integrated into coherent ego functioning.
Physical abuse: Repeated physical violation overwhelms the bodily ego's capacity to maintain boundaries.
Chaotic or unpredictable environments: The infant cannot develop stable organisational structures because environmental conditions change too rapidly or randomly.
Medical trauma: Extended hospitalisation, painful procedures, or separation from caregivers during critical developmental windows.
In such conditions, the developing ego faces an impossible task: how to organise and contain experience that is fundamentally overwhelming. The result is not mere rigidity but fragmentation.
Ruptured egos manifest in several ways:
Dissociation: Experience is split off from awareness because integration is impossible. This may be episodic (under stress) or chronic (as a baseline state).
Identity confusion: Without coherent ego boundaries, the sense of self becomes unstable or unclear.
Affect dysregulation: Emotions flood through the ruptured boundaries without modulation, or are completely shut down.
Relational chaos: The capacity for stable, coherent relationships is impaired when the self cannot maintain stable boundaries.
Somatic symptoms: The ruptured bodily ego expresses distress through physical presentations—chronic pain, tension, or illness without clear medical cause.
Rigid egos and ruptured egos are not mutually exclusive—indeed, they often coexist. A person may develop rigid defences around the rupture point, creating what might be visualised as a heavily fortified crack in the gingerbread figure. The person maintains apparent coherence through extreme control, but stress that exceeds the fortification capacity triggers fragmentation.
Clinically, this presents as individuals who appear rigidly defended most of the time but episodically collapse into dissociative or chaotic states. Their daily functioning depends on maintaining tight control; any loss of control risks complete fragmentation.
The most challenging aspect of ego rupture formed during the preverbal period is its inaccessibility to verbal therapy. The person cannot "remember" trauma that occurred before they had language or coherent memory systems. They cannot "talk about" experiences encoded somatically and procedurally rather than narratively.
Yet these preverbal ruptures profoundly affect functioning. Adults may experience:
Unexplained states: Sudden shifts into fear, rage, or collapse without conscious awareness of triggers.
Body memories: Physical sensations or impulses that seem to have no current source.
Relational re-enactments: Repeating patterns from preverbal experiences without understanding why.
Triggering by infant/child behaviour: Becoming overwhelmed when their own children reach the developmental age when their ego ruptured.
Traditional talk therapy, focused on narrative integration and cognitive processing, cannot address these patterns directly. The rupture exists at a level below language, requiring somatic and relational interventions that work at the same level where the original damage occurred.
When assessing families, practitioners should attend to signs of ego rupture:
Developmental history: What happened during the first 18 months? Hospitalisations, separations, abuse, neglect?
Dissociative patterns: Does the person describe feeling like "different people" at different times? Do they lose time, have amnesia for important events, or describe observing themselves from outside?
Somatic presentations: Chronic unexplained physical symptoms, particularly those that fluctuate with stress?
Affect storms: Sudden, overwhelming emotional states that seem disconnected from current circumstances?
Parenting patterns: Particular difficulty with specific child developmental stages, suggesting triggering of the parent's own developmental trauma?
This assessment recognises that the most crucial information may be what cannot be spoken—the patterns operating in the preverbal realm of soma and procedure.
The previous sections described ego rigidity and rupture points—but what happens when environmental stress so overwhelms the developing ego that it cannot maintain even fragmented unity? Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele (2006) describe "structural dissociation," where the personality fragments into separate subsystems, each with distinct functions, affects, and capacities.
In our gingerbread metaphor, we can visualise this as smaller, fully-formed gingerbread figures breaking away from the main form. Each smaller figure has its own colour (id energy), shape (ego boundary), and features (superego function)—a complete if limited self-system operating with relative autonomy from the whole.
This dissociative process, whilst extreme, represents a sophisticated protective mechanism. When experience is too overwhelming for a unified self to process, the psyche compartmentalises: "This part of me will hold the terror; this part will maintain normal functioning; this part will manage relationships." Each subsystem handles what it can, preventing complete systemic collapse.
Adults with structural dissociation often describe experiencing distinct "parts" or "modes":
The Professional: Competent, articulate, appropriate—the face shown to the world
The Frightened Child: Holding early terror, easily triggered into overwhelming fear
The Protector: Vigilant, sometimes aggressive, defending against perceived threat
The Numb One: Detached, depersonalised, managing overwhelm through disconnection
These are not metaphorical descriptions—clients experience genuine shifts in sense of self, emotional capacity, and cognitive access. When "the frightened child" is activated, the adult feels five years old, thinks like a five-year-old, and responds with five-year-old capacities. When "the professional" is present, those childhood feelings become inaccessible, sometimes creating confusion about their reality.
Schwartz's (1995) Internal Family Systems therapy explicitly works with these "parts," recognising them as adaptive subsystems rather than pathological symptoms. His approach aligns with our framework: each part developed in response to specific environmental needs, held particular aspects of experience, and served protective functions.
Not all dissociation is pathological. Mild dissociative capacity—the ability to shift attentional focus, compartmentalise temporarily, or "put on a professional face"—is adaptive and common. Sub-personalities exist along a spectrum from everyday adaptive functioning to severe fragmentation:
Everyday adaptive dissociation: The person who adopts "professional mode" when negotiating a car purchase because "being me somehow isn't going to get the result, but professional me knows what to say and how to say it." This strategic deployment of different self-states serves functional purposes without compromising overall coherence.
Maladaptive but functional dissociation: The mother under child protection scrutiny who prioritises work over social worker appointments because "work mode" represents her comfort zone—a place where she feels competent and safe, away from the vulnerability of her real life circumstances. The professional self becomes a refuge from the overwhelmed parental self, but this refuge prevents addressing the underlying difficulties.
Severe dissociation with lost core self: Most profoundly, the person living on the streets engaged in full conversation with themselves—distinct voices arguing, negotiating, or comforting each other. Here, the fragmentation has become so complete that the integrating "true self" may have been lost long ago, leaving only the subsystems operating with increasing autonomy and decreasing coordination.
These examples illustrate that sub-personality formation exists on a continuum. Problems arise when:
Dissociation becomes rigid: The subsystems cannot communicate or integrate, creating fragmented functioning and identity confusion.
Inappropriate subsystem activation: A child-part takes control in adult situations, or a protective part responds to safety as if it were threat.
Loss of executive function: No stable "self" coordinates between parts, leading to chaotic or unpredictable behaviour.
Temporal confusion: Past and present collapse—a current situation triggers a child-part who responds as if the original trauma is occurring now.
The parent who is warm and engaged one moment, then suddenly cold and withdrawn, may be experiencing subsystem shifts. The partner who oscillates between desperate attachment and cold distance isn't being manipulative—different parts hold different relationship templates.
Whilst dramatic dissociation often follows discrete trauma, the capacity for structural dissociation is shaped during early development. Lyons-Ruth and colleagues (2006) demonstrate that disorganised attachment—arising from frightening or dissociative caregiving—creates the template for later dissociative patterns.
An infant who experiences caregivers as sometimes safe, sometimes frightening, with no predictability, faces an impossible bind. The attachment system drives them toward the caregiver for safety, but that same caregiver is the source of threat. This "fear without solution" (Main & Hesse, 1990) cannot be resolved through unified ego functioning. Instead, the psyche fragments: one part attached to "good parent," another terrified of "bad parent," with limited integration between these contradictory experiences.
Because this occurs during the preverbal period, these dissociative templates are encoded somatically and procedurally. The adult experiences sudden shifts in state but cannot understand their origin. They may describe feeling like "a different person" at different times without recognising these shifts as dissociative responses to early relational trauma.
Structural dissociation becomes particularly problematic in parenting. A parent's child-part may be triggered by their own child's needs, creating role confusion or rejection. Their protector-part may interpret normal child behaviour as threat, responding with harsh control. Their professional-part may provide competent care whilst their vulnerable parts remain hidden and unmet.
Children of dissociative parents often develop hypervigilance toward parental shifts: "Which parent am I getting today?" This uncertainty recreates the conditions that fostered the parent's original dissociation, potentially creating intergenerational transmission of structural fragmentation.
Moreover, different sub-personalities may hold contradictory parenting beliefs and practices. The parent desperately wants to be warm (professional part) but cannot tolerate their child's emotional intensity (frightened child part) and responds with withdrawal or anger (protector part). They genuinely cannot understand their own inconsistency because different parts are operating with limited mutual awareness.
Understanding preverbal ego formation and structural dissociation fundamentally reframes how practitioners interpret family behaviour. The parent who doesn't implement parenting strategies isn't necessarily resistant—their rigid ego structure or dissociative patterns may prevent implementation despite genuine desire to change.
Consider the common scenario: a parent attends a parenting programme, demonstrates good understanding, articulates commitment to change, then continues the same problematic patterns. Traditional interpretation might suggest lack of motivation, passive resistance, prioritising own needs over children's, or inability to learn.
However, through our framework, alternative explanations emerge: the strategies require ego flexibility the parent's rigid structure cannot provide; verbal learning cannot override preverbal procedural patterns; a frightened child-part takes control under stress, unable to access adult learning; or the parent's own unmet attachment needs flood their capacity to meet their child's.
This reframing doesn't excuse harmful behaviour or reduce accountability, but it does shift intervention approach from "teaching what to do" to "addressing what prevents doing."
Effective assessment must look beyond current presentation to developmental foundations. What was the caregiving environment during ego formation (birth-18 months)? Were there disruptions, trauma, hospitalisations, or separations? What was the emotional climate—predictable, chaotic, frightening? How was the infant's communication responded to?
Practitioners should also examine somatic and relational patterns: How does the parent experience and regulate emotion? What is their relationship with their body—connected, numb, conflicted? How do they respond to stress—rigid control, collapse, dissociation? What are their attachment patterns with professionals?
Understanding parenting triggers is crucial: Which child behaviours provoke disproportionate parental response? Do these connect to the parent's developmental period? Are there sudden shifts in parental state suggesting dissociative responses?
Finally, assess intergenerational transmission: Are the conditions being created for the child similar to the parent's early environment? Is the parent's rigid ego structure preventing attunement to the child's unique needs? Are parental dissociative patterns creating "fear without solution" for the child?
This assessment recognises that the most crucial information may be preverbal and somatic, requiring observation of relational patterns and bodily presentations rather than relying solely on verbal report.
If the core difficulties are preverbal, somatic, and structural, intervention must address these levels through body-based approaches like sensorimotor psychotherapy (Ogden et al., 2006), EMDR (Shapiro, 2001), somatic experiencing (Levine, 2010), and yoga and mindfulness (van der Kolk, 2014).
Relational and attachment-based work is equally important: the therapeutic relationship itself becomes the intervention (Schore, 2012). Consistent, attuned responsiveness provides corrective experience. Video Interaction Guidance helps parents see their attunement capacity. Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (Hughes, 2009) works with parent-child patterns.
For working with dissociative parts, Internal Family Systems (Schwartz, 1995) helps parts communicate and cooperate. Practitioners should recognise and address child-parts directly when they emerge, build connection between dissociated subsystems, and help the "self" develop executive coordination.
Environmental modification also plays a crucial role: reducing current stress to decrease ego rigidity, creating safety so protective structures can relax, providing practical support that demonstrates reliability, and slowing pace to match processing capacity.
Crucially, these approaches don't require the client to verbally recall or process preverbal trauma. Instead, they work at the level where the trauma is encoded—body, procedure, relationship.
Perhaps most importantly, this framework helps establish realistic expectations. Ego structures formed over the first 18 months of life, reinforced across decades, cannot be fundamentally restructured in a 12-week parenting programme.
What's possible includes increased awareness of patterns and triggers, developing "observer" capacity to notice subsystem shifts, learning temporary regulation strategies, creating safety that allows some ego softening, and improving understanding of child's developmental needs.
What's difficult includes fundamental restructuring of rigid ego boundaries, integration of deeply dissociated parts, overriding somatic patterns through will alone, and eliminating responses to preverbal triggers.
What takes extended time includes building ego flexibility through consistent safe relationship, developing earned secure attachment, processing cumulative preverbal trauma, and creating new procedural patterns to replace old ones.
Services must be designed around these realities. The "high tariff" families who cycle through multiple interventions may not be failing—the interventions may be failing to address the actual level of difficulty.
Sometimes, despite best efforts, fundamental change isn't possible within available timeframes or with current resources. In these cases, practitioners must focus on harm reduction (can we prevent the worst outcomes even if we cannot create ideal functioning?), provide ongoing support that maintains minimum safety rather than demanding transformation, protect children (when parental structures cannot change sufficiently, what alternative care might enable the child to develop healthier ego structures?), and advocate for resources (what would this family need that current services cannot provide?).
This approach is more honest than pretending that brief interventions can address deep structural difficulties whilst potentially blaming families for "not engaging" when the engagement expected is psychologically impossible.
This work is emotionally demanding. Practitioners repeatedly encounter human suffering encoded before language, resistant to current interventions, often repeating intergenerationally. Without proper support, this can lead to vicarious traumatisation, compassion fatigue, cynicism and burnout, or defensive practice focusing on compliance over connection.
Services must support staff through regular reflective supervision addressing emotional impact, training in trauma-informed practice, realistic caseloads allowing relational work, recognition that "success" may be incremental improvement not transformation, and opportunity to process grief about limitations of what can be offered.
The convergence of psychoanalytic observation and neuroscientific research validates many of Freud's structural insights whilst refining our understanding of mechanisms. The id's "primary process" corresponds to right-brain, limbic processing; the ego's "secondary process" to left-brain, prefrontal integration; the superego to orbital-frontal inhibitory functions (Solms & Turnbull, 2002).
This integration offers practitioners a more complete picture: psychoanalytic theory provides the phenomenological understanding (what it feels like), neuroscience provides the mechanistic understanding (what's happening in the brain), developmental psychology provides the timeline (when and how structures form), and trauma theory provides the clinical application (how to intervene).
Whilst Freud's model emerged from a specific cultural context, the basic principle of ego adaptation to environment has universal relevance. However, what constitutes "adaptive" varies dramatically across cultures. The ego structure that ensures survival in one context may be pathological in another.
Practitioners must consider cultural variations in what constitutes appropriate ego boundaries, social factors that create "harsh environments" (poverty, racism, community violence), the interaction between individual ego formation and collective trauma, and how Western therapeutic models may pathologise adaptive responses to oppression.
This cultural humility prevents misdiagnosis of survival strategies as pathology.
Understanding preverbal ego formation has systemic implications. Assessment protocols need to capture developmental history before 18 months. Intervention models must integrate somatic and relational approaches. Training programmes should include attachment, trauma, and body-based understandings. Service timescales must accommodate the reality of structural change. Outcome measures need to capture incremental ego flexibility rather than just behavioural change.
Services designed around cognitive-behavioural models may inadvertently exclude families most in need of support.
This exploration of preverbal ego formation through Freud's structural model offers practitioners a framework for understanding why some families remain stuck despite multiple interventions. When the ego forms under harsh conditions before language develops, it creates rigid structures that resist verbal intervention and perpetuate intergenerational patterns. The formation of sub-personalities through early ruptures further complicates presentation and intervention.
Yet understanding these dynamics also points toward hope. Recognising that rigid ego structures and dissociative patterns represent adaptive responses to overwhelming early environments, rather than character flaws or wilful resistance, allows practitioners to approach families with compassion and realistic expectations. The work requires patience, relationship, body-based approaches, and extended timeframes—but it is possible.
For parents reading this work, particularly those recognising themselves in these patterns, the message is both validating and challenging. Your struggles are not character failures—they are the legacy of adaptations made before you could speak, encoded in your body and procedural memory, operating outside conscious control. Understanding this doesn't remove responsibility for your impact on your children, but it does explain why knowing better doesn't automatically translate to doing better.
Healing is possible, though not through verbal understanding alone. It requires patience, safe relationship, body-based work, and often professional support. Most importantly, understanding these patterns allows you to make conscious choices about what patterns you pass to your children. Your rigid ego structure protected you, but your children deserve the opportunity to develop more flexible boundaries in an environment you can work to make safer than the one you experienced.
For practitioners, this framework provides theoretical grounding for what many already observe: that the most entrenched family difficulties often have their roots in preverbal developmental periods, that these difficulties resist standard interventions, and that effective work requires relational, somatic, and trauma-informed approaches delivered over extended timeframes. This understanding should influence not only individual practice but also service design, training priorities, and policy decisions about resource allocation.
The question is not whether families with deep structural difficulties "deserve" extended support—it's whether we as a society are willing to provide what is actually needed rather than what is convenient to offer. When we understand that parental rigidity and dissociation often represent preverbal adaptations to harsh environments, perpetuated across generations, our interventions must be sophisticated enough to address these realities. Anything less is cosmetic change masking structural limitation.
Crucially, today's practitioners and parents have something Freud never possessed: the accumulated wealth of research and theory that emerged in response to his work. Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969), object relations (Fairbairn, 1952; Winnicott, 1965), neurodevelopmental research (Schore, 1994; Siegel, 1999), trauma studies (van der Kolk, 2014), and contemporary psychoanalytic thinking (Bromberg, 1998; Fonagy et al., 2002) have each challenged, refined, or extended Freudian concepts. Many of these frameworks directly contradicted Freud's specific claims whilst being inspired by the questions he raised. Like Freud's own work, these subsequent theories are important and often seminal contributions—and like his work, they each carry their own limitations and potential flaws. The history of psychological understanding is not one of steady progress toward perfect truth, but rather an ongoing conversation where each generation builds upon, argues with, and sometimes overturns its predecessors' conclusions. What matters is not finding the single "correct" theory, but developing robust, evidence-informed frameworks that genuinely help us understand how people function, develop, and sometimes struggle—tools that serve practitioners and families navigating the messy realities of human development and relationship.
Freud's structural model, reinterpreted through contemporary developmental and trauma understanding, offers a framework both profound and practical. It explains the seemingly inexplicable, provides direction for intervention, and, perhaps most importantly, invites compassion for the remarkable capacity of the human psyche to protect itself through whatever means available—even when those protective adaptations ultimately become the source of suffering they were designed to prevent.
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