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In Part I of this paper the author reviews the history and relation between two parallel studies with a common interest, psychoanalysis and child development. She believes that the work of both child psychologists and psychoanalysts has been limited by the fact that each group has largely ignored the work of the other. Both groups, too, have suffered from slowness to consider constitutional differences and the implications of these for personality development.
Part II consists of a series of loosely organized theoretical comments based on the author's observations of infants and children. A few examples will illustrate the kind of theoretical implications made. There is a recurrent emphasis on the complexity of the child's personality and on the complexity of the factors and forces that are relevant to personality development. The author decries descriptions of a mother-child relationship in terms of too much love or too little love as grossly oversimplified. Rather, the mother-child relationship must be viewed as a complex one between two complex organisms, each with its own specific needs, sublimations, rhythm, and other qualities. Observations on the infant's need for stimulation suggest to the author that more theoretical emphasis should be placed on processes that maintain and increase tension, which evidently have not been given as much consideration as those that reduce tension. From her observations, Murphy believes that the concept of the secondary process has been too rigidly connected with verbalization and that of primary process with visual imagery, since relatively conflict-free autonomous thinking with neutralized energy may be carried out by the young child, apparently without verbalized thought.