Especially important for the Ausbildung or development of self-consciousness is the reminiscence of the past. For in this way one comes to see a difference between that center of past (psychic) conditions and current ones; hence all psychic conditions are recognized as accidental: the individual itself cannot be reduced to any one of them, and hence appears, in apperception, to stand forth as distinct from them (SW VI: 179). Thus, we come increasingly to see our selves as distinct from our external environment, and from the here and now, and a (representational) complex emerges “of which all the component parts may be negated, so that none of them seems essential to it”—and this is the ego (SW VI: 180).