The Psychology of Screaming1

My main theme is the infant's scream of intense rage. The whole field of the psychology of screaming is too vast a subject. I am concerned with those violent screaming fits which not only signalize, but in themselves constitute the infant's most painful situations. I personally find I am only now beginning to understand them. No psychoanalytical writings have carried me very far in their specific problem, apart from that of anxiety in general, though Melanie Klein's work is full of their derivative phantasies. Bernfeld, 2 the most explicit, leaves some of the most important problems unsolved. Yet these screaming fits must contain the core of the problem of infantile anxiety, and on the importance of that there is no need to insist.

I suggest, first, that such screams are essentially aggressive attacks in situations in which, as in infancy, other forms of effective attack and flight are precluded; secondly, that where they fail to achieve any satisfaction, even of the rage itself, i.e. where they fail allo-plastically, they work auto-plastically; and thirdly, that it is worth while to trace out some of the metamorphoses or vicissitudes of the scream, which is certainly one of the earliest instinctual activities.

To enlarge slightly on the auto-plastic activity of the baffled scream of rage, ended only by exhaustion, I have come to consider that it provides the basis for that puzzling division of the human psyche through which, to quote Fenichel, 3 'man comes to inhibit the path of his own instincts, which promise him pleasure through their gratification'. I suggest that not only do actual experiences of this type provide the germ of anxiety as a danger signal, Freud's view of the trauma of birth, but also that the division of the psyche against itself in later screams (which I hope to demonstrate) provides the endopsychic basis of all conflict. Ambivalence itself can exist without conflict in early infancy, in the sense that the infant can cry lustily one momen