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DAVID A. FREEDMAN OPENED THE PANEL by quoting William Harvey, in 1651, to the effect that nature displays her secret mysteries in cases that are apart from the beaten path, as we have difficulty perceiving many aspects of nature unless we are deprived of them or they are deranged in some way. Freedman indicated that we were not concerned in this panel with the deficits per se, but with the more interesting problems for psychoanalysts in how our study of early deficits can contribute to an understanding of the processes of internalization and psychic structure formation as well as the processes underlying affect, motivation, and the sense of self-object differentiation.
Freedman defined early deficit as "any vicissitudes of congenital or perinatal life whose effect is to exclude its victim's development from the range of the average and expectable." So defined, early deficit encompasses a large range of congenital and perinatal somatic defects as well as adverse environments, e.g., "high-risk" individuals. He went on to develop the rationale for studying such individuals, claiming that "they have relevance to psychoanalytic theorizing because they provide us with the opportunity to make prospective observations