You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Clinicians know that egocentricity, concrete thinking, splitting, enactment, unstable self- and object representation, and like phenomena often appear in concert. Elaborated theories about the motives for these operations are familiar to analysts, but details of their mechanisms and ontogeny are not well described in our literature. We work daily with primitive thought processes, but our ideas about the processes themselves have progressed little beyond their description by Freud and the ego psychologists.
Event Theory examines the early development of thought and emotion, extending Piagetian concepts to include areas of psychoanalytic importance. In Fast's theory, experience is composed of the unitary "events," actions in their entirety. Psychological development is the result of the differentiation of elements of events and the integration of those elements into new conceptual entities. The unitary event, infant-pleasurably-sucking-at-breast-while-gazing-into-mother's-face, is gradually differentiated and associated with other events yielding experiences of a self, action, object, and emotion. Piaget demonstrated that the progressive reorganization of experience through such differentiation and reintegration can account for cognitive development at all levels. Fast and her coworkers expand his ideas to include psychoanalytically important realms, providing new and very interesting descriptions of narcissism, primary-process thinking, self and object relations, egocentricity and emotion.
Babies do not behave as Freud's theory of infantile narcissism predicts. They are fascinated by their environment and interact with it from birth. This interest and engagement is not merely the result of physiological distress. Forty years of infant observation confirm