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DISCUSSION: Dr. Frank Curran spoke of physical malformation and its effect on personality, and offered clinical examples from his experience with adolescent and latency children. Serious physical defects in children hospitalized for emotional difficulties are frequent and remedying them aids their psychological status. Schilder's work on body image and his own research projects demonstrate the conscious denial of dissatisfaction with one's own physical defects. Dr. Curran emphasized the need to provide particular supervision for children of psychotics.
Dr. Alexander Thomas pointed out the disparities between retrospective studies and child development observations. He stressed the importance of evaluating all aspects of the motivation for and effect of working mothers on their children's development. Maternal deprivation must no longer be a catch-all descriptive term; precise definition is needed. Dr. Thomas extended Mahler's concept of separation-individuation throughout all of adult life and suggested that it is a 'much more all-encompassing and dynamic framework than formulations which center on the development and resolution of the Oedipus complex', which might be considered one specific aspect of the separation-individuation process. He emphasized that 'intrinsic behavioral deviations in the child' are as important as disturbances in the mother.