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In the introduction, David Freedman informs us that his book was created to serve as a text for a ten-session seminar devoted to the epochs of infancy and toddlerhood. Topics include maturation and development, earliest object relations, deprivation syndromes, gender identity formation, and developmental interferences.
As the chapters unfolded I found myself immersed in the material familiar from previous readings but enriched by Freedman's capacity to integrate the accumulated knowledge of development from psychoanalysis, attachment theories, infant observation, cognitive field, anthropology, and neuroscience.
Freedman establishes Rene Spitz as the father of all psychoanalytic investigations of very early growth and development I share Freedman's enthusiasm for Spitz's contributions, especially his ideas in the area of the earliest sensory inputs, which are a combination of relatively imprecise, poorly localized stimuli, which Spitz named coenesthesia. Even though coenesthesia is gradually replaced by a more refined mode of sensory experience, referred to as a