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This is a report on eight babies, from five days to seven months old, with breast feeding difficulties. In each case rejection of the newborn by the mother or an intercurrent conflict in the mother is adduced as the causative factor. Petö agrees with Ferenczi that 'the child can only be prevented by great tenderness from sliding back into nonexistence which is still near. If love and care are lacking, these destructive impulses soon begin to operate, and they have much more power at this early age than has been willingly assumed hitherto.' He also believes that 'even at the age of five days … object relations can be proved to exist'. He concludes: 'It is remarkable that, apart from mealtimes when they are very excited, the infants are quiet, self-sufficient and cheerful despite starvation… One of the infants, aged eight weeks, was sucking his dummy also continuously… If the object-libidinal cathexes are disturbed, they bring about a disturbance of the narcissistic libido, assuming that intake of food is—at least in part—an expression of narcissism. Thus it would seem that the fate of the narcissistic libido is dependent on the vicissitudes of the object libido which, apparently, shape the characteristic behavior of self-sufficiency and turning inward of the ill child. Our observed material seems to suggest that libidinous object cathexes are unconditionally necessary for the preservation of life.'
What Petö calls object cathexis of the five-day-old baby is simply empathy. He underestimates the megalomanic position of the baby who seems to assume that everything good comes from himself, everything bad from the outside. There are good reasons for Freud's assumption that the baby at first believes that the breast (or bottle) is part of himself. The sequence of events is as follows: the fantasy of self-sufficiency, followed much later by depositions of narcissistic libido outside, which is then, according to Freud, called 'object libido'. Petö seems to rev