The Infant's Reaction to Strangers: By Thérèse Gouin Décarie. In collaboration with Jacques Goulet, Martine Darquenne Brossard, Sandra Rafman, and Ruth Shaffran. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1974. 233 pp.

The normal developmental phenomenon termed 'stranger fear' which appears to a lesser or greater degree in eight-month-old children contains more puzzles than was originally assumed. Observation shows that there is a time lapse between the infant's ability to differentiate the familiar from the strange face and his fear responses: visual

differentiation appears as early as four to five months, whereas the fear appears only three to four months later.

Décarie asks whether the time lapse might be due to the progressive development of object relations, or whether one must assume the development of new perceptual capacities. She finds that neither of these assumptions offers sufficient explanation. Piaget's finding, however, that concept formation develops independently of perception does, according to Décarie, shed light on the surprising discrepancy. At about eight months, Décarie assumes, the previously perceived stranger has acquired a new cognitive meaning for the young child. This theory, it seems to this reviewer, is entirely compatible with the psychoanalytic theory of object relations, according to which strangers acquire new affective meaning. At some point they simply become people-whom-one-must-mistrust. What is phenomenologically novel is precisely the 'unfriendly', unhappy behavior which the child displays vis-à-vis people he does not know intimately. It appears at first to be an affective progress rather than a perceptual one. It is not that we are dealing here with an either-or proposition; the mutual interdependence of affect and concept formation is, after all, what analysts deal with daily. Nor is Décarie negating such an interdependence. It is rather a question of primacy. What comes first, the more mature feeling tone, or the more mature concepts? Spitz's 'organizer' which assumes the coalescent maturation of several bodily and affective and cognitive functions seems eminently useful in this context.

Décarie gives credit to Spitz for ha