Body, Mind and the Sensory Gateways: By Felix Deutsch, M.D. with the collaboration of Donald Thompson, Charles Pinderhughes, and Harold Goodglass. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1962. 106 pp.

The late Dr. Deutsch proposes (as have also Freud and Piaget from different sets of data) that the infant's first awareness of environmental objects begins with the sensory experience of his own body in relation to the object. Thus every perception of an object is 'a composite of very early cathexed sense perceptions which were once formed into a body ego. These sensory constellations became fused through partial identification with sensorially perceived parts of other objects qualified to represent the ideational image of a mother or father, woman or man.' If this is so, then 'any sensory signal must by necessity reach down to early memories, since sensory impressions belong to the first objectless sources of psychic development. They are the sensations of that pre-ego period before strong defenses (superego forces) are developed. All sensory stimuli—external and internal—lead to memories of object relationships on a pregenital and primary narcissistic level. These stimuli trigger memories of these relations on a preverbal level.' This hypothesis, says Deutsch, can be applied in his method of 'associative anamnesis'. 'Objectless sensory stimuli initiating the interview should pierce the unconscious at an instant when the defenses against tabooed object relations are not thoroughly alerted.'

Deutsch examined his hypothesis by carrying out six associative anamneses with four patients, using different initial sensory stimuli. These