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DISCUSSION: Dr. Edith Jacobson questioned the definition of affect as a strirred-up state of the organism, both because it is too broad and because it may not apply to the pleasurable affects. She stressed the importance of whether anxiety is the infant's first psychic experience. While she agreed that psychic determinism can be demonstrated from birth, that elements of psychic life may exist from that time, and that tension is necessary for psychic development, she wondered on what evidence the authors based the inference of rising and falling levels of sensorimotor behavior. She also questioned the contention that the ability to discriminate the mother is an example of imprinting.
Dr. Gustav Bychowski found the signs of anxiety that were shown on the slides to be as suggestive of anger as of anxiety. He noted the special role of aggression as a defense observable in adults against the encroaching symbiotic hand of the mother.
Dr. Max Schur felt that the central idea of the paper that anxiety is a psychic organizer was obscured by the introduction of peripheral concepts, such as imprinting, stimulus barrier, and primary narcissism. He differentiated between the physiological precursors to anxiety and anxiety itself. He is not convinced that unpleasure should be called anxiety.
Dr. Margaret Fries stressed the importance of mother-child interaction as against imprinting. Dr. Manuel Furer found certain aspects of the concept of imprinting intriguing as so much of the behavior of psychotic children is difficult to explain. Some show little responsiveness to the mother but are fascinated by objects, such as a fragment of plastic. It has sometimes been possible to determine that these 'psychotic fetishes' are remnants of libidinally invested object-representations.