Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Edith Jacobson pointed out that rocking, whether active or passive, must correspond to some very primitive primary and basic needs on the part of the child for gratifying libidinous discharge patterned after the intrauterine existence. It must also correspond in some way to the mother's need of the child. Often it appears to have a masturbatory quality. Dr. Andrew Peto saw in Dr. Brody's hypotheses corroboration of some of his own observations. Acceptance of her hypotheses, he pointed out, must lead to the assumption that in the seventh month of life there is already a long history of ego structuralization. It would seem that very archaic forms of thinking and internal object representation can be expressed by the infant through movements of the body.

Dr. Judith Kestenberg pointed out that in the cases presented it was the mother who was instrumental in providing specific relief and not the rocking. Relief had become associated with contact with the mother and fused with the infant's own way of achieving relief, namely rocking. The rocking reaction is a phase-specific one. One can observe in normal children a phase-specific rocking which occurs regularly in the transitory phases during which antigravity movement complexes are learned. It is a kind of practice in equilibrium without the expected traversing of space to follow. The focus is on retaining the center of gravity within the body rather than on the periphery of the body. It is known that up to two years of age, infants use labyrinthine-righting reflexes, after which time they are abolished. Possibly where visual stimuli are restricted other components of equilibrium become emphasized. Even pathological rocking often ceases in the third year of life. Dr. Kestenberg enumerated four factors which operate in the prolonging of the transitory rocking of infants. First, a constitutional vestibular kinesthetic responsiveness whereby play with gravity and antigravity becomes a source of