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With great economy Dr. Chess has reviewed some important implications of empirical research on early childhood behavior for psychoanalytic theory and the practice of child psychiatry. Her review suggests that the “new look” in human infant research confronts the theory with a serious challenge to revise its developmental assumptions, particularly as they pertain to clinical practice. In support of this conclusion, she compared traditional views about the “incompetent” infant as a random collection of vegetative reflexes, and contemporary views of the “competent” newborn infant (Stone et al., 1972) as an organism equipped with adultlike potentialities for processing perceptual information, engaging in subtle social transactions, communicating felt emotions, and cognizing the world. Such a concept negates descriptions of the infant as an empty black box that passively records and faithfully stores sense impressions, that is enslaved to “accidental” environmental factors, and that ultimately is dependent on whatever the environment may or may not offer. On the basis of unobtrusive observations and experimental studies, she concluded instead that the human infant acts selectively on those aspects of the “objective” stimulus world which it can assimilate, transforms these into stage-appropriate experiences (Wolff, 1966), and transforms itself as it changes the material and social world. Thus she called into question a wide range of clinical assumptions about the linear causality between early trauma, overindulgence, deficit, or deprivation, and later psychopathology, intellectual impairment, or social deviance.