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In a musical spoof of psychoanalysis, Tom Lehrer suggests, “A boy's best friend is his mother.” Well, perhaps. Certainly we psychoanalysts do pay significant attention to this proposition in our clinical work. But we also know that mother is not the only friend a youngster has, although we often tend, I think, to underemphasize the role that other friends play in our patients' life histories. In this paper I would like to discuss just how early in a child's life these friends—peers—can, in fact, enter and affect the universe of a developing human being.
When we, as psychoanalytic developmentalists, refer to an infant's dawning self and object awareness, we usually connect his experience with his mother—traditionally, the principal caretaker. Lately, we have begun to consider the father's uniquely paternal role as equally important as, and different from, maternal caretaking in contributing to a child's preoedipal psychic development (Atkins, 1981, 1982, 1983; Cath, Gurwitt, and Ross, 1982).
But we inevitably say that those who do not directly perform a caretaking function (often including the father in this category) or who do not disrupt that function (usually inferring siblings in this category) are incidental or unimportant to the development of object relatedness. We seem to view noncaretakers in the infant's universe only for their “stimulation value”—whether they provide excitement, tranquillity, or confusion for the baby—considering them neither more nor less important to the development of social relatedness than other things in the environment, like toys.