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November 29, 1977. MATURATIONAL VARIATIONS AND GENETIC DYNAMIC ISSUES. (Abraham A. Brill Memorial Lecture.) Annemarie P. Weil, M.D.
Dr. Weil proposed that certain observable mild deficiencies and achievement lags encountered in the course of child development are traceable to the consequences of the variable role of neurophysiological maturation in the early months and years of life. Child observation and analytic reconstruction suggest that the period of toddlerhood is the most significant for the examination of three crucial areas of primary autonomous ego functioning: perception, motility and language.
Perceptual functioning in the first eighteen months of life serves to promote and structure self-object differentiation and is fundamental to the capacity to organize experience. Since the integrative function is crucially involved in the management of anxiety, imbalances in the timing and level of emergence of this capacity can contribute to disturbance in the developing ego functions. A mismatch between the child's degree of hypersensitivity and his or her available patterns of tension discharge can lead to diminished outward-directedness and a diminished capacity for attention. Tactile or kinesthetic hypersensitiveness can interfere with a child's being able to be held comfortably by a caretaker. Asynchronous development in certain physiological subsystems may interfere with the synchronization of the infant's motility with the maternal voice. Even subtle perceptual disturbances can lead to difficulties in processing and integrating stimuli; the warding off of the associated anxiety might lead children to a hypervigilant control of themselves or their surroundings, or to a pattern of instigation of chaos through some externalization of their inner state.
A number of characteristic developments in later childhood may be related to these maturational phenomena, as may certain difficulties in adult adjustment. Some of the perceptually affected children show