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Observations of the rocking behavior of infants living under normal home conditions, as well as of hospitalized infants in varying degrees of psychological distress, permit a classification of infant-rocking into three types. Normative rocking appears spontaneously or with encouragement in social situations as part of normal infant development and is apparently related to feelings of direct pleasure or anticipation. Repetitious rocking, accompanied by facial expressions of mild apathy and withdrawal, seems to have no social function, is monotonous, appears to give reassurance, and often leads to sleep. Agitated rocking, also with no apparent social purpose, is usually rapid, fatiguing, and energetic, sometimes to the point of producing serious physical injury; it occurs in infants who seem unresponsive to external influence or respond with obvious signs of distress to any interference with the rocking. The latter two forms exhibit stereotypy and excessive detachment, indications of internal processes for which the rocking is not an intentional communication.
Descriptions of two normal, healthy infants, part of a research study of normal infant-mother interactions, are presented in detail to support the author's main hypotheses. 1. Repetitious and agitated self-rocking occurs in anxiety states among infants whose object cathexis of the mother is intense and who have experienced special degrees of kinesthetic stimulation concurrent with a contrasting paucity of