Interactive Influences on the Development of Defence and Language in a Three-Year-Old Boy

The Study Group on Developmental Disturbances1 examines in depth a number of pre-latency children who were, or are, in intensive treatment and whose early development was initially followed in one of the departments of the Educational Unit of the Hampstead Clinic. Comparison of the recorded observational data of the Well-Baby Clinic, the Mother-Toddler Group or the Nursery School with later general material obtained from the analysis opens up many interesting areas for study and poses many questions. We may want to know, for example, what inferences can be made about developmental processes from surface observations; whether or not the observers' early concerns about developmental difficulties were verified by later analytic material; or whether phase-specific developmental difficulties which had been observed match those reconstructed in the analysis.

While many such questions are touched on in our discussions, our primary aim is to detect the roots of pathological development and to determine when, where and why the individual child's development began to deviate from the expectable norm. This task requires careful scrutiny of the interaction of constitutional, maturational and environmental factors in terms of their relative strengths, of their timing, and in relation to the mastery of developmental tasks. It also requires scrutiny of the effects of parental pathology on the developing child, in the child's responses, at different times, to the impingements associated with parental pathology and the interplay between the two. One may also try to account for the ‘choice of defences’ which often determines the path towards the child's eventual adaptation or maladaptation in terms of psychological health.