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This work is a classic in its field. In the conviction that psychoanalysts and other students of human communication cannot help but gain through encounter with the observations made available by Dr. Spitz in his excellent monograph, this reporter will summarize it in its entirety.
Spitz' attention was initially drawn to negative cephalogyric motion, a pathologic behavior of hospitalized infants suffering from severe deprivation. This motion follows the approach of an object. The infant rotates his head on its sagittal axis as he visually fixates the object, and does not cover his eyes, but does scream or wail and clutch or kick the blankets. It is not similar to spasmus nutans, which is a spontaneous tremor.
Rooting is a scanning and searching behavior of normal infants, present from before birth to three months, and is probably a medullary reflex. Following perio-oral stimulation, the head makes rapid rotations on its sagittal axis, with the mouth open, until the mouth finds the nipple and closes on it. (Following bilateral perioral stimulation, oral grasping results.) In psychoanalytic terms, rooting both expresses a tension and seeks to discharge that tension. It is present during the undifferentiated phase. Rooting is a striving toward an object, and also an innate releasing mechanism (defined as an innate neurosensory mechanism which