Point of View

The extraordinary intricacy of all the factors to be taken into consideration leaves only one way of presenting them open to us. We must select first one and then another point of view, and follow it up through the material as long as the application of it seems to yield results.

During nearly fifty years of psychoanalytic investigation Freud tried first one and then another point of view from which to start his inquiries. Dreams, the symptoms of neurotic patients, the behaviour of primitive peoples were amongst the varied data he studied. But, although in his search for explanation he was in each case led to events of early childhood, he himself only rarely drew for his basic data on direct observation of children. The result is that most of the concepts that psycho-analysts have about early childhood have been arrived at by a process of historical reconstruction based on data derived from older subjects. This remains true even of ideas that stem from child analysis: the events and processes inferred belong to a phase of life that is already passed.

The point of view from which this work starts is different. For reasons that are described in the preface it is believed that observation of how a very young child behaves towards his mother, both in her presence and especially in her absence, can contribute greatly to our understanding of personality development. When removed from mother by strangers young children respond usually with great intensity; and after reunion with her they show commonly either a heightened degree of separation anxiety or else an unusual detachment. Since a change in relations of one or other of these kinds, or even of both compounded, is frequent in subjects suffering from psychoneurosis and other forms of emotional disturbance, it seemed promising to select these observations as a starting-point; and having adopted this point of view to ‘follow it up through the material as long as the application of it seems to yield re