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In this paper the author endeavours to show that—although an infant's love for its mother has a different quality from its love for its father and from the love which an adult has for his partner (except during actual sexual intercourse) in that it has no regard for the interests of its object, is pre-ambivalent and is as yet entirely uninfluenced by considerations of reality—nevertheless this early form of love is a true object
relationship and as primary and self-subsistent as primary narcissism. Moreover, in her view, auto-erotic interests are not so much the precursors of allo-erotic ones as co-existent with them, ready to be brought more strongly into play whenever the child suffers a frustration of its object-love.
This archaic quality of 'naïve egoism', as the author calls it, which characterizes the child's love for its mother is workable in the early stages of life because the interests of both parties are in fact identical. When, later on, their interests diverge, the child has to begin to adapt itself to reality and to learn to deal with its own conflict of feeling; and in this way it makes its first step in the development of feelings of 'love' as we know them.
As regards the mother's love for her child, Mrs. Bálint thinks that though it is similar to the child's love for its mother in that it, too, has the quality of 'naïve egoism', it differs from it from the fact of not being purely instinctual but influenced by reason (in so far as the mother is a cultural person), and from the fact that whereas the child feels wholly dependent on its mother for its safety and for its gratification, the mother is not dependent on her child to nearly the same degree.
The author supports her thesis with material taken from four case-histories.