Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

January 11, 1966. TRAUMA AND INFANTILE EXPERIENCES: A LONGITUDINAL PERSPECTIVE. Albert J. Solnit, M.D. and Marianne Kris, M.D.

Data from the longitudinal and psychoanalytic study of one child in whom the consideration of acute and chronic trauma was essential for understanding the child's development were presented. The child, Margaret, and her surroundings were studied from in utero to age fourteen and the data were correlated with detailed clinical material from her analysis.

Both parents came from a deprived lower socio-economic group. The mother liked to receive gifts from mother substitutes and felt that men had all the advantages. She vomited until the seventh month of pregnancy and feared both that the child had been damaged and that the child might damage her. From the second day of life, the child showed poor tolerance for tactile, kinesthetic auditory stimuli which evoked a jarring startle reaction. Child and mother interacted in a way that interfered with the development of a mutually harmonious intimate physical closeness. At age three months Margaret could comfort herself more effectively than could the mother by holding her. At six to twelve months she reacted with panic to a stranger's touching her or the absence of her mother from the room. She showed relative acceleration of motor development in the second half of the first year, and her capacity to recognize and organize her impressions of the environment was advanced. In the second and third years there was evidence of an arrest in her development of identification as an adaptive function of the ego.

At three-and-a-half years, when she had been in psychoanalytic treatment for three months, a traumatic incident occurred. Because she was being noisy and restless on the back seat of the car, her mother stopped the car in a swampy, uninhabited area and commanded Margaret to get out of the car. She became frightened and cried, but finally allowed her mother to strap her in the front seat of