From the Literature on Neonatology

It is no longer news that William James was wrong; the neonate is not "a buzzing, blooming confusion." Neither is it true that early infancy is a time of walled-off autistic functioning with only occasional forays into contact with the environment. Beginning with Peter Wolff's (1959), (1966) discoveries regarding infant states and their relationship to infant functioning, each passing year has extended our knowledge of infant capacities and their adaptive significance. The neonate (birth to two months) is now known to be an organized and organizing being, not only responsive to inner rhythms and needs, but also initiating and participating in a perceptual and motoric dialogue with the outer world of things and people. This is not to suggest that we have found infants to be "mature" or that they possess a form of psychological organization which would be familiar to us from child or adult functioning. At best, we know only the lineaments of that organization, but what we know is sufficient to say confidently that its qualitative richness and adaptive value, especially in eliciting attachment responses, far exceeds the presumptions of past theories. In this commentary I will discuss two of the more recent findings which confound traditional views of the infant; they are the related demonstrations of neonatal "imitation" and intermodal matching.

In 1953, René Zazzo, Director of the Laboratory of Infant Psychobiology, Institute des Hautes Études, Paris, stated:

The origins of imitation are still rather mysterious. Eight years ago I observed a fact which I consider almost inexplicable. I noticed in my son, who was then twenty days old, the imitation of putting out the tongue. At first I thought it was a mistake, that it was I who had imitated the child and not the child who had imitated me. I tried this experiment again several times. I took a film of it and later I was able to examine six infants in whom this imitation also appeared between the twentieth and th