The Self, In and Out of Relatedness

The past few decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in infant, neonatal, and intrauterine research. The resulting revisions in the traditional view of the infant come at a time when psychoanalysis is also revising and broadening its theoretical base along lines that parallel infant research. Analytic initiatives in the areas of object relations and the study of the self dovetail with research findings on the infant's interaction with caregivers and its adaptive prowess. There has been a trend among those who have produced or studied infant research to upgrade the infant's status from autistic to realisitic, helpless to adaptive, passive to active, and from tabula rasa to shaper of its environment. This shift arises from the new data, but perhaps it also reflects differences in the clinical versus the research population. Developmentalists, looking at the “Before” group, are impressed by the newborn's unexpected competence. Clinicians, who deal with the “After” group, have been impressed by the infant's relative helplessness in the face of long-term pathogenic influences.

Many psychoanalytic thinkers have welcomed the new empirical base and have already begun to explore its implications for psychoanalytic theory and clinical work with adults. This chapter is an effort to contribute to that task. Infant data are uniquely valuable in that they are fundamental, normative, and largely uncontaminated by the environment. As such, they provide a basic architectural design of human psychology. Although profound transformations and discontinuities mark the growth process, certain basic developmental agendas, guide