We have been asked to respond to Henri Parens' important study on The Development of Aggression in Early Childhood. We propose to comment briefly upon his research findings and to add some thoughts of our own regarding aggression and its place in psychoanalysis.

Through his psychoanalytically informed observations of a controlled population of infants and their mothers over a number of years, Parens studied the emergence of aggression in the first three years of life and identified four separate categories, or strands, of aggression. He conceptualized these strands as a continuum of aggressive responses from destructive to nondestructive. Parens provides extensive case illustrations and commentary to support his conclusions organizing his material in accordance with Mahler's stages of separation-individuation. His study incorporates an extensive review of the literature on aggression focused primarily on mainstream contributors. Included is an explication of Freud's two theories of aggression. The first theory, dating from 1905, opposed