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The results of longitudinal study of children and their families, from the third or fourth month of pregnancy on, are incompatible with Rank's thesis that the birth trauma is the one overwhelmingly important factor in the causation of pathological anxiety and severe neurosis. However, they are in agreement with Greenacre's proposition that the birth experience is one of several factors associated with a variable predisposition to anxiety. The author agrees with Freud that constitutional factors play a much more important role in the predisposition to anxiety and neurosis.
Benjamin refutes the tendency to consider the first six to eight weeks of life as being essentially without psychological content. He states that it is empirically demonstrable that different experiences are differently perceived and utilized in learning at this age. For example, the smiling response of the two to two-and-a-half-month-old child is not only maturationally determined but is significantly correlated with previous experiences with the mother as a source of tension reduction and of undifferentiated positive affect. With the lowering of the stimulus barrier in the first three to four weeks of life, the increase in tension accumulation through increased external stimulation demands the intervention of an 'object', i.e., a mother figure, for help in tension reduction. In the absence of such an object the infant is prone to outbursts of negative affect which may be considered an indication of an increased predisposition to anxiety. It can be demonstrated that different previous experiences significantly codetermine the frequency and nature of fear responses in the third, fourth, and fifth month to strange situations, strange objects, and occasionally even to strange faces. The author's data does not confirm Spitz's differentiation of these reactions as responses to memory traces of real danger; true anxiety responses, or fear of object loss, occur later in the first year of life, i.e