Young Children's Responses in the Light of Early Cognitive Development

During the early decades of psychoanalysis very little was known about the development either of a child's cognitive abilities or of his relations with his parents during his first two or three years of life. As a result a variety of rather arbitrary guesses were made, many of them much influenced by the assumption that a child's interest in persons is necessarily secondary to, and derived from, his desire for food. Thus at one extreme it was confidently believed that a child as old as two years is still so dominated by his physiological needs that he switches his affections promptly to whoever at the moment is meeting them. At an opposite extreme complex cognitive abilities, and relationships with the breast as a part-object, were attributed to infants no more than a few months old. On the basis of these ideas two or more quite different theories of social development were elaborated by psychoanalysts, leading inevitably to widely divergent theories of mourning.

Today, thanks to the systematic studies of a steadily increasing band of developmental psychologists, it is no longer necessary to rely on guesses. Whilst a great deal still needs to be learned, a reliable outline of cognitive and socio-emotional development during the earliest years is becoming available. In this chapter I indicate briefly how children's responses to separation and loss can be considered in the light of these findings.

In giving attention to cognitive development I am drawing first and foremost on the work of Piaget (see especially The Construction of Reality in the Child, 1937 and Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, 1951) and also on the work of Bower (1974), whose imaginative experiments have led him not only strongly to support Piaget's concepts but also to elaborate and clarify them. Bower's work suggests that during the first year of life an infant is appreciably more advanced in his cognitive development than Piaget initially supposed and