You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this short but ambitious work, Stern makes a valiant effort at a very difficult task. He wishes to integrate psychoanalytic views of human development, mastery of trauma, etc. into a 'teleonomic' (goal-directed) theory of evolution, based on Monod's concept of 'autonomous morphogenesis'—summarized by Stern (p. 142) as:
A living being's structure owes almost nothing to the action of outside forces, but everything, from its overall shape down to its tiniest detail, to "morphogenetic" interactions within the object itself. It is thus a structure giving proof of an autonomous determinism: precise, rigorous, implying a virtually total "freedom" with respect to outside agents or conditions—which are capable, to be sure, of impeding this development, but not of governing or guiding it, not of prescribing its organizational scheme to the living object (pp. 10–11).
Monod's view bridges the 'innate' and the 'acquired':
When behavior implies elements acquired through experience, they are acquired according to a program. That program is innate—that is to say, genetically determined. The program's structure initiates and guides learning, which will follow a certain preestablished pattern defined in the species' genetic code.
This goal is elucidated only in Stern's last chapter. The building blocks of human psychic development which he wants to use are not always made entirely clear. One central emphasis is Stern's equation of teleonomy or morphogenesis, at the psychological level, with gradual mastery, which involves 'attributing meaning to one's own states of tension'. He sees arrests in development as failure to attribute meaning to one's own states of tension: he finds this situation in pavor nocturnus and also in the repetitive phenomena of the transference neurosis. In fact, he tries to equate the two in some sense. He states in his last chapter, 'I should like to propose that the state of tension to which meaning is not attributed in the transference neurosis is