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There are great difficulties in understanding the psychological aspects of the earliest years of life. The immature human infant, like the non-human animal, is an organism grossly different from the adult scientist who studies him. Because of this difference, there has always been a tendency to adultomorphize the infant, and to anthropomorphize the animal. In addition, there is rapid growth and development in the infant which is influenced both by inherent maturational factors, and by experiential environmental factors.79 Such rapid change makes the study of a phenomenon difficult, especially where the variables are multiple and complex. Furthermore, the infant, being pre-verbal, cannot communicate information about his thoughts and feelings, and thus our most useful tool in understanding psychological phenomena is lost.
The first twelve to eighteen months of life have been called the oral stage of development.1,33 The mouth is important not only for nutritional functions but because it is the region around which occurs the beginnings of psychosexual and ego development.25,46 The oral zone is the source for earliest sexual pleasure and at the same time is the most primitive apparatus for reality testing and relating to the outside world. Freud33 referred to the oral stage as the “cannibalistic