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I feel presumptuous to be the discussant of such an excellent paper as we have just heard. My impulse is to throw the meeting open to discussion from the floor, but since I have been allotted ten to fifteen minutes, this noble impulse died aborning. Egocentricity won out!
I, too, take great pleasure in being a member of a program honoring Jule Nydes. My relationship with Jule differed from that of the other panel members in that I was his student. As you can see from my white hair, I must have been a slow learner or a late bloomer. I was a member of the courses and seminars that he gave, and also had the great privilege of having him as a control analyst.
Matthew Besdine discussed so brilliantly in his paper the phenomenology attendant to different styles of mothering. He also indicated much evidence that in the first year of life adequate mothering experience has genuine survival value for the infant. This mothering embraces the whole emotional atmosphere between the infant and the person or persons who love him, whether or not they are the ones responsible for his physical care. Based to a remarkable extent on the quality and quantity of relationship established by the infant to the mothering figures, assets and liabilities develop in his personality. This mothering relationship in infancy may be almost absent or may have varying intensities and meanings. Even if the relationship is essentially hostile, it is still a relationship.
In the early 1930's, David Levy began to discuss the“over-protective mother.” At that time he was treating children mainly, and the influence of the mother's personality problems on the child became evident to him. Out of this interest in helping mothers, he