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It is argued that psychoanalytic theories of infancy, based on retrospective extrapolations from adult psychopathological phenomena, are theoretically overloaded and empirically underdetermined, and, as such, are in need of further empirical constraints. It is shown that such clinical reconstructions reflect conflicting metapsychological assumptions over which there is no current consensus, often leading to serious under- or overestimation of the infant's early representational capacities. The historical reasons underlying these theoretical developments in psychoanalysis are briefly discussed. It is argued that to establish their empirical validity, psychoanalytic theories of preverbal development need to integrate the significant empirical advances of current developmental
Acknowledgments. I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers on an earlier version of this paper for their valuable comments. I would also like to thank Péter Bodor, András Bor, Marylene Cloitre, Gergely Csibra, Zoltán Nádasdy, Szabolcs Kis, Judit Székács, Mario Testani, Otto Thaler, and John Watson for their clarifying discussions. During the preparation of this work I was supported by a grant from the MTA-Soros Foundation.
Dr. Gergely is at the Department of Psychology, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.
psychology. This is illustrated by a critical examination of Melanie Klein's and Margaret Mahler's alternative psychoanalytic accounts of the developmental origins of defensive splitting and projection from a cognitive developmental viewpoint. The cognitive prerequisites for the construction of a defensive delusional representation of reality are spelled out in terms of (1) operational, (2) dynamic, and (3) representational conditions. The developmental origins of these cognitive prerequisites are examined in the light of current experimental findings, and are critically related to the Kleinian versus the Mahlerian accounts. Finally, some specific hypotheses are proposed about the developmental origins of splitting and projection, relating these psychodynamic issues to current conceptualizations of the development of object identity, early conceptual organization, and basic cognitive mechanisms of causal and intentional attributions. It is argued that while the primary function of such early, and possibly innate, cognitive ego mechanisms is adaptation to the structure of the physical and the social world, they might also provide the structural basis for psychodynamic defensive operations which, however, appear only later in development.