Lecture by Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld on her concepts of Protosystem, Deuterosystem and E.
Edited by Mollie Dundas B.A., A.B.Ps.S., Dip. I.C.P. in 1952.

No individual can endure for long the strain of psychotherapeutic work, particularly work with children, unless they are supported interiorly by a quiet and unbreakable confidence in the strength of the dynamics that they are studying and using. In considering the fundamental dynamics not only of human beings, but of human society, it seems to me that there is a need to take by a far wider series of facts into account in deriving our principles than has so far been done.
For a long time I tried to accept the view that the affective processes and the Jungian individuation processes are really adequate as dynamics to account for human development, but found it quite impossible to do so.
I took therefore a different angle. I tried to find material which could account for two rather different concepts. First, how did the superego come into existence at all? What was it that led the most primitive caman to develop a code of morals, or a code of social behaviour? Today we are continually finding ourselves confronted with a slide back into the most primitive phenomena and a forgetting of all the knowledge so painfully acquired. Again and again human beings fall into the same trap of thinking that after all force is obviously the most effective means.
Now, parallel with that tendency to slide back into being the caveman with the club comes the opposite phenomenon: the fact that these methods do not work: that force used in that way meets a peculiar counterforce: that some of those human beings subjected to every kind of violence will come out still unmalleable. So it seems to me that mankind is in the position of having constantly to maintain his meagre gains, with the concentrated use of all that is sensible in him. Then the older view about there being automatic progress is quite untenable if gain is so difficult to maintain and mankind tends to forget it so quickly. We have the evidence of the Mayan civilisation and all the other civilisations which have been destroyed and our own in the process of being destroyed.