The Effect of Sensory and Other Deficits in Children on their Experience of People

IT IS MY INTENTION IN THIS presentation to consider the nature of the antecedent circumstances that make possible the emergence of the ability to experience affect and to enter into object relations. I shall present evidence in support of the thesis that these readily distinguishable psychological functions actually develop pari passu in mutually interactive sequences—in what Freud might have considered complementary series. It is apparent that the implications of this statement would by no means be acceptable to all psychological let alone psychoanalytic observers. In effect, I am positing that for many months after his birth, the infant is not capable of having subjective experience. If I am correct, such words as affect, goal, purpose, and drive cannot be applied in a meaningful way to the newborn. Nor, in my view, does it make sense to impute to him even the most primitive and rudimentary aspects of either self-awareness or of such implied derivatives of self-awareness as the abilities to differentiate self from nonself, to enter into relations with other selves, or to establish internal representations of others. Rather, I propose that all these functions—which are basic to virtually all psychology—emerge in intimate relation with one another, and as a result of the ongoing maturational and developmental processes.1 Among