Anxiety, Socialization, and Ego Formation in Infancy1

This paper is drawn from a larger work that deals with the way that anxiety emerges in and is handled by the infant, and with the consequences of these events for both the infantile ego and the ego of later life. From the larger work we take up a few issues here: mainly, the sensorimotor attainments that culminate in a series of developmental peaks during infancy, and the relationship between these developments and certain experiences to which the infant normally is exposed.

The emergence of the affect of anxiety2 from a matrix of physiological and psychic interrelationships during infancy is a complex and significant issue. All of our genetic formulations regarding psychological health and illness, and many dynamic formulations regarding defences, rest upon our understanding the process of this emergence. We should like to embark upon its study equipped with a knowledge of the reciprocal influences of cognition and primary process and of the nature of consciousness. We should like to have at hand some accepted classification and theory of affects. But in addition to our metapsychological theory and a great array of clinical reports, we have only a modest group of empirical findings, mainly about early evidences of ego function, to work with.

In recent times the ego has been said, more or less loosely, to be defined by its functions. The statement is useful for descriptive purposes, but it leads away from an understanding of processes involved in the development of the ego as a psychic entity. To us it is crucial to make use of the stricter definition, and to say that perception, motility, memory, reality testing, abstract reasoning are forms of behaviour which come under the jurisdiction of the ego. Despite all the advances of modern ego psychology the ego itself is most usefully to be understood, according to Freud's definition of 1923, as a coherent organization of mental processes, i.e., as a state of psychic organization which makes possible mediation be