Sylvia Brody, Ph.D.

In 1950 Sylvia Brody began a pilot observational study to learn how maternal behavior influenced infant development. She wanted to make explicit the experiences of infants during the oral phase, and so clarify the complexities of maternal care. She discovered, and reported in the classic Patterns of Mothering (1956), that the way a mother conducted the feeding of her infant was the best single index of her general behavior and attitudes toward the infant, and of her responsiveness to the infant's needs and wishes. She believed that this was so because of the particular anxieties aroused in the mother by the feeding situation, and also, she speculated, because a mother's behavior during feeding reflected her freedom to gain gratification in caring for her infant while at the same time wrestling with her own inner anxieties. The feeding situation proved to be an especially rich source of study because it allowed for consideration of many collateral maternal activities, such as body contact, tempo, visual and verbal communication, and a variety of accessory behaviors. By examining the behavior of mother and infant and their mutual and ongoing responses to each other, Brody sought to elucidate the ways in which the mother's unconscious conflicts influenced how she recognized and how appropriately she satisfied the infant's needs and wishes.

In 1963 Brody began a much larger study, to determine if her findings would be significant in a larger and more diverse sample of mothers and infants. She also wanted to determine if the patterns she had distinguished statistically and clinically during the first six months would be stable throughout an infant's first year. This work eventually became a longitudinal study of 131 mother/infant dyads over the course of the first year of the children's development. In the original study, which gave rise to Anxiety and Ego Formation in Infancy (1970), statistically significant relations were found between types of maternal behavior and qu