You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Anew baby coming into a family, a three-month-old flashing a smile, a six-month-old crawling, and a one-year-old looking to mother for guidance are such manifestly lively presences that it seems puzzling that psychoanalysis, approaching its centenary, is still actively seeking to discover the essential nature of infancy — or at least remains embroiled in controversies about the babyhood its retrospective focus has reconstructed.
In Psychoanalysis and Infant Research I sought to illuminate many of the controversies by presenting alternative concepts of the nature of infantile life gleaned from the works of experimental and observational researchers, trying always to present in summary form the data on which the alternative view is based. Now I, as well as you, the reader of the commentaries presented here, have an opportunity to reconfront many of these controversies as they are stated with vigor and clarity by the essayists: Have I failed to go far enough in advocating the abandonment of outmoded inaccurate theories (Demos)? Have I gone too far in my critique of drive theory (Dowling)? Have I taken too much of a phenomenologist position and understated the intrapsychic organization (Gedo)? Have I failed to utilize sufficiently the valuable direct observations of Mahler on separation individuation while overstating the influence of cognitive processes (Bergman and Pollens)? Would a more consistent application of a psychoanalytic systems theory provide a