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Anxiety in Infancy: A Study of Its Manifestations in the First Year of Life. René A. Spitz. Pp. 138–143.
The phenomenology of anxiety from birth to the end of the first year is discussed on the basis of a behavioristic observation of its manifestations in two hundred and eighty-four infants. At birth only discharge phenomena in the nature of unpleasure are observable. Their counterpart is quiescence. A high perceptive threshold acting as biological stimulus barrier performs defense functions. In the second and third month pleasure and unpleasure responses to environmental psychological stimulation become specific. After the sixth month phenomenologically definable manifestations of anxiety can be observed at the approach of strangers. This is the first normal manifestation of anxiety proper, called by me 'eight months anxiety'. the approaching stranger can overcome it by turning his back on the child which thereupon will reach out for him.
Later this anxiety branches out. Under abnormal circumstances pathological patterns of anxiety appear, such as in marasmus, in anaclitic depression, in coprophagia.
In this sequence tensional states, discharge phenomena and unpleasure manifestations are distinguished phenomenologically from anxiety proper. Anxiety proper appears in the third trimester for two reasons:
1The Structural Reason. Anxiety is experienced in the ego which is not present at birth. The development of the rudiments of an ego which is necessary for the experience of anxiety proper is achieved by the second half of the first year. Before this has taken place the physiological tension states are dealt with by diffuse phenomena of neuromuscular discharge characterized by overflow. At this stage conflicts can arise between the drives themselves, between their component parts, between the whole of the system and environmental demands made upon it, or by the subjection of the system to environmental frustration. Anxiety proper is manifested at the stag