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DISCUSSION: Dr. Aaron H. Esman agreed with Dr. Pine's main thesis. However, he disputed Dr. Pine's tendency to give the "phase" concept an objective reality it does not have. Development is a continuous, seamless flux. The segments into which the observer partitions it refer to his purposes and so are, of necessity, arbitrary. "Phases" are merely the constructs of the observer. But in this context, Dr. Pine's stress on "moments" is important. It allows for a heuristic designation of a coherent pattern of responses, behavior, fantasies, and interactions, without the assumption that it embraces the totality of the child's psychophysiological repertoire. Dr. Esman agreed that the ideas "normal symbiosis" and "undifferentiated phase" should be retained, recognizing these terms as relative designations of complex psychobiological states. Infants have perceptual and discriminatory capacities far beyond what we used to think. But an infant's ability at any given moment to use these capacities is a function of his "state." The very young infant's general inability to assimilate and integrate these capacities make his general