DISCUSSION: Dr. Charles Brenner felt that the author's interpretations of behavior in early childhood, such as the smiling response and stranger anxiety, attribute mental activities to infants which are not possible until considerably later. In addition, Dr. Brenner considered the concept of primary early fear of total annihilation to be a radical revision of the psychoanalytic theory of anxiety, with misleading therapeutic implications for the analysis of such fears in adults. Dr. John B. McDevitt stated that object-directed aggression does not appear very much in the first year because self-object differentiation evolves slowly and incompletely in the first year. Only with the rapprochement subphase (thirteen months) does the child ordinarily experience feelings of sharp and traumatic separateness.