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This account of the observations it is possible to make on an infant in the first year of its life and the significance to be attached to them was delivered as an address to the first-year medical students in Cleveland, Ohio, the first group to receive their training under the new medical curriculum instituted at Western Reserve University in 1952. These students were to begin their medical education not in the dissecting room but in the antenatal clinic, initiating a contact with the expectant mother, which it was planned they should carry through the various stages of pregnancy, confinement, and postnatal care, and which should continue for the term of their medical studies.
In the simple and sensitive description of observable phenomena the analyst will readily recognize that the students are being introduced to the earliest manifestations of the operation of instinctual forces, to processes leading from part to whole object relationship, and to the differentiation of the body self. The account covers the functioning of the primitive pleasure ego and the earliest developments of reality testing. Needless to say, the complete absence of analytic terminology proves entirely compatible with the presentation of an exact description of early developmental processes.