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The hallmark of René Spitz's research and writings is his persistent focus on how the libidinal and aggressive drives are developed, organized, and transformed within the earliest mother-infant dyad. Spitz's focus on drive development distinguishes him from most researchers on infancy and developmental psychology and, for that matter, from many present-day psychoanalysts. Spitz believed that to insure our survival as individuals and as a species we must be “led by the hand by the twin gods of Eros and aggression.” Though he often drew on ethnology, embryology, gestalt psychology, and evolutionary theory, Spitz's ultimate concern was to enrich the psychoanalytic metapsychology with his clinical observations of infant behavior. In contrast to a researcher like Bowlby who, for example, concentrated on actual loss and separation, the maternal deprivation that engaged Spitz was the loss of dialogue that normally facilitates the unfolding of the libidinal and aggressive drives.
It is in this spirit that the title, Dialogues from Infancy, appropriately encompasses the broad range of psychoanalytic psychology that Spitz claimed as his legitimate field of inquiry: drive and ego development, the emergence of the libidinal object and the later vicissitudes of object relations, the formation of psychic structure, transference, and defense manifestations in the clinical situation.
The editor of the volume, Robert Emde, himself a renowned researcher on infancy, psychoanalyst, and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Denver, where he was a colleague and collaborator of Spitz from the late 1960s until Spitz's death in 1974, is to be congratulated not only for his appreciation of the organizing principles of Spitz's work but also for selecting and arranging the papers in a format that enhances the reader's comprehension of the chronological sequences and conceptual dimensions of Spitz's methodology and thought.
The book is divided into eight parts, the first six of which cont