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Dr. Emde is to be commended for the selection and arrangement he has made of Dr. Rene Spitz's papers. He has made available in one volume the seminal papers on maternal deprivation, the smiling response, auto erotism, the development of the ego, aggression, clinical psychoanalysis as well as film archives and some early case studies.
It was Spitz's work which changed so many of our hospital practices with sick children in such areas as allowing parents to stay with them; stimulating them with toys, color, sound, and touch while in hospital. It is embarrassing to recall now that when introduced by him these ideas did not meet with immediate acceptance. Even now, forty years later, it is not always routine to allow parents to stay with hospitalized children. They often have to persuade reluctant hospital staff, unaware of the emotional need of the child, to let them stay.
Many of Spitz's observations may have application today in our consideration of our present problems. One that comes to mind is his observation of the increased incidence of infection in infants institutionalized and deprived of their mothers. This increase in infection may have similarity to the increased incidence of infection reported by some in regard to children in day-care centers where they may be left from early morning until six or seven in the evening. The key factor may be the lack of “mothering” caretakers in some of the day-care centers where infants are left for too many hours by their working mothers.
The section on dialogue between mother and infant and particularly the paper on derailment of the dialogue may have special interest for us today. In this paper he links the derailment of the mother infant dialogue with the increase in the problem of “juvenile delinquency; ever more sadism; teenage crime; widespread, and at the same time, socially ostracized homosexuality; severe neuroses and psychosis; strange forms of social groupings with, to say the least, peculiar mores; even more inapp