  The relation between father and son is also contained, if concealed, in the account Freud offers in The Ego and the Id (1923) of how the ego emerges. There Freud writes that identification is “the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person” (Freud 1968 [1923], 37), i.e., it is prior to object-cathexes or relations of desire. The primordial libidinal, but non-objectal, attachment is with the father of “personal prehistory” (Freud 1968 [1923], 37). The subsequent and recurring retreat from object-cathexis (investment of instinctual energy in an object) to identification (withdrawal of that energy into the self), is the primary mechanism of ego-formation, taking the lost object into oneself. Since the ego is the “precipitate” of abandoned objects, it is configured through loss, in a melancholy reabsorption that incorporates via identification objects from which the ego would otherwise be exiled. Just as the father retains dominance in political life after his death, so he dominates psychic life even prior to the ego's formation. In Freudian theory, the father's reign is pervasive, his sovereignty extended in every domain. Freud's privileging of paternal and fraternal relations provides the impetus for much of psychoanalytic feminism, as will be discussed below.