Infant Observation and Psychoanalytic Theory

The effort to bring infant observation to bear on psychoanalytic theory has been criticized on the basis that we cannot make reliable inferences about an infant's inner world since we lack verbal reports from the infant. Zuriff (1992), for example, has recently argued that data from direct observation of infants cannot be used to alter existing psychoanalytic formulations because of "general logical difficulties in inferring intrapsychic experience from behavioral data in the absence of introspection" (p. 33).

Such criticism overlooks the fact that psychoanalytic theory has always made inferences about infant observation to build theory; inasmuch as this is so, the more recent observationally based approaches are no more speculative than the earlier ones. Freud (1920), in his pivotal interpretation of the famous "Fort-Da" vignette, used inferences about preverbal experience as evidence for the repetition compulsion, a fundamental psychoanalytic concept that remains influential today. Like today's infant researchers, Freud was mindful of the difficulties involved in characterizing infantile psychic life, going so far as to caution his readers that he was drawing on a "fiction" in his early linkage of infancy and primary process (1911, pp. 219-220, n. 4). Nonetheless, he proceeded with the effort, and a number of subsequent analysts have done the same. Many images of the infant have been proposed that have influenced analytic theory and clinical practice: the aggressively fantasizing baby of Melanie Klein and her followers (Isaacs, 1948); (Klein, 1952), the merging infant of Margaret Mahler (Mahler, Pine, Bergman, 1975), the need- and pleasure-driven baby of Anna Freud and her colleagues