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In the development of aggression in early childhood, Parens is interested in studying the role of the aggressive drive in the epigenesis of the self within the structure of the Mahlerian conceptualization of symbiosis and separation-individuation as well as within the traditional psychoanalytic metapsychological framework.
The title of Gedo's critique, “On Black Bile and Other Humours,” expresses Gedo's principal objection: “Parens comes all too close to writing about aggression as if it were an autogenous poison perfusing the organism that must gradually be detoxified—or about ‘the ego’ as a liverish organ designed to accomplish that task. As a version of psychoanalytic drive theory, that is a bit more concrete than most, a contemporary variation of the Renaissance notion of Humours.”
Gedo thinks that Parens bases his categories of aggression—unpleasure-related destructive, nonaffective destructive, nondestructive, and pleasure-related destructive—on the assumption that all behavior must be impelled by one of the instinctual drives. This basic assumption leads Parens, in Gedo's view, to prejudge the meaning of his data and to impregnate the descriptive data with his theoretical presuppositions.
Gedo singles out a number of Parens' observations for commendation, among them that Parens' data demonstrate that hatred and destructiveness in young children are invariably the results of excessive frustration. The reader may note the significance other essayists, especially Morton and Estelle Shane, give to this point.
James Grotstein's commentary ranges over a very broad field of psychoanalytic discourse. Here the reader will find the death instinct brought into a modern context of neurophysiology, infant research in general, and Parens' studies in particular, Grotstein