Recent Research in Developmental Psychology

There has long been a gulf between academic psychology and psychoanalysis and nowhere has this been more marked than in the field of infant understanding, as evidenced by the variety of theories of child development which have emerged. A crucial point of divergence has been in relation to the kind of evidence which is offered in support of these theories. In trying to understand a young child's mental processes we are presented with enormous problems and possible sources of error. Bion has pointed out that there is not only the semantic gap to be bridged but also the question of the scientific propriety of attributing to infants experiences similar to our own. “Though the difficulties of penetrating the adult mind in analysis are great they are less so than attempting to penetrate the infant's by speculative hypothesis.” (Bion 1962).

On the whole, academic psychology has in the past coped with this problem by restricting investigation to those areas which have been considered suitable for scientific study, namely behavioural observations in controlled conditions, often with infants apart from their mothers and presented with a variety of standard objects. Areas of ‘speculative hypothesis’, such as the infant's feelings and emotional experience and relationships have often been left strictly alone, resulting in what Bryant (1974) has called “the psychologist's bleak picture of the young child's capabilities”. Indeed infants have been deemed unsuitable subjects for scientific investigation. Theories of child development have often seemed to psychoanalytic observers to give undue weight to cognitive factors or not to allow for the interrelationship of cognitive and emotional aspects of personality development.

Psychoanalytic interest in the study of child development began very early, in fact with Freud. To quote Hartmann (1950), “Analysis is also, and has always been, in Freud's work, general psychology. Freud's aim, expressed as early as in the Nineties, in material re