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No issue in the field of human development has created greater controversy than the dispute over the effects of nature and of nurture as the causative elements of human behavioral patterns. Few, if any, present-day theoreticians would subscribe to the notion that this is an either/or proposition — that the neonate is a “tabula rasa” on which experimental determinants inscribe the ultimate personality outcome, or, vice versa, that the human organism is preprogrammed to follow a developmental sequence which remains untouched or barely touched by human experience. Today most would agree that both nature and nurture provide the quintessential elements necessary to human personality outcome. Differences in theoretical position depend to a great extent on the point of emphasis.
As psychoanalysts we are constantly tempted to attribute as much as we can of the process of development to experiential events, and to minimize, or at times even ignore, the roles of constitution and inborn attributes with which our patients, as well as ourselves, arrive in this world. Possibly we all share the feeling that deviant processes attributable to experiential determinants can be modified, with sufficient insight and a solid corrective emotional experience, whereas constitutional givens, based on anatomical and neurophysiological factors, may be beyond our control and beyond the reach of psychoanalytic