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Edited by Albert J. Solnit, Ruth S. Eissler, Anna Freud & Peter B. Neubauer. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982, vii + 588 pp., $37.50.
A reviewer of a previous volume of the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (Olch, 1978) suggested that it would be helpful to have an epilogue essay to delineate some of the implied dialogues among the authors. It is not my intention to write such an essay, but as part of my review I would like to borrow the idea and share the potential dialogue I hear. Reading this volume, it struck me that a number of the authors dealing with manifestly diverse topics were each leaning heavily on the same developmental observation and conceptualization to support their theses. This unanimity struck me as noteworthy, and I could not help but continue to explore what it might mean. For the first dialogue I would bring together Brinich ("Ritual and Meanings"), Gaensbauer ("Differentiation of Discrete Affects"), Harmon, Wagonfeld, and Emde ("Anaclitic Depression"), Dowling ("Mental Organization in the Phenomenon of Sleep"), and Piaget. Perhaps Wolff ("Flying") should sit in as well.
Brinich proposes that the birth of meaning in communication is imbedded in the sensorimotor events in the early mother-infant interaction. The repetition of such events he calls "rituals," and these rituals take on significance of precognitive meaning. He emphasizes the activity between mother and infant as the "meaning-acquisition device" for the child. This begins with the feeding rituals in early infancy and continues to the time when rituals merge with words.
Gaensbauer proposes that although in the early months a child