It would note the limited potency assigned to the ego and the near-imperviousness assigned to the id as limiting psychotherapy mainly to alteration of the superego and casting society as the villain of the piece. By such means (there are, of course, other terms and relations in Freudian theory omitted from this analysis) the initial analysis reveals the extent to which the Freudian theory is primarily a theory of the vicissitudes of the instincts, that its treatment of sociality is curt and subordinate to its treatment of the ‘inner’ life, that it has little to say about the development of cognitive components of the personality, including those cognitive competences by which the infant begins to differentiate itself from other persons and other things and which only some adults carry far (clearly an important practical matter both for psychotherapy and for education).