Chapter 10 Recognition of Separateness and Otherness

Freud says little about the child's development in earliest infancy, his interest in childhood being particularly focused on the development of sexuality (Freud 1905, 1909). Klein, by contrast, makes a point of saying that there is a rudimentary ego at birth and that object relations begin virtually at birth (Klein 1946: 2, 1952b: 57, 1955a: 138, 1958: 236, 246, 1959: 251).

Klein's view of the early ego and early object relations contrasts markedly with the work of a large number of psychologists, psychoanalysts and infant researchers who have been concerned to observe, experiment on and develop theories about the development of the infant's awareness of his own ‘separateness’ from others and of his attachment to them. In the USA most researchers have focused on the development of awareness of separateness (Mahler 1975; Stern 1977, 1983, 1985, 1988; Blatt and Blass 1990; Blass and Blatt 1992, 1996; Pine 1992). In Britain, as Blatt and Blass point out (1990: 109), there has been more focus on the importance of the attachment aspect of infant and child development as shown in the work of Fairbairn (1952, 1963), Bowlby (1944, 1951) and Winnicott (, ).

My own view is that attachment and separateness are so intrinsically involved with each other that efforts to separate them are bound to be artificial. In any case I think it is unlikely that we are ever going to know what infants think, which is what psychoanalysts and psychologists would most like to discover. We know a great deal about what infants do, but what they think is another matter; all we can do is make hypotheses based on what we observe. Of course all interpretations about what adults and older, verbal children do, say and think are also bound to be based on inference and conjecture, but

inferring what infants think from what they do is particularly problematic.

In the 1980s I was interested to note that in his book The Interpersonal World of the Infant Daniel Stern shows that newly-born infan