THE OBSERVATION OF CHILDREN HAS BECOME AN IMPORTANT PART OF psychoanalytic knowledge and training. It has gradually and consistently pushed back into the past the limits of what we recognize as being important for the development of the child. As knowledge accumulated, new techniques of treatment and intervention began to be developed. In addition, early childhood observations are an important factor in the development of psychoanalytic theory: on the one hand they provide the clinical material to confirm or disprove working hypotheses on which much analytic work is based; on the other hand early childhood observations become the basis for new theoretical formulations. Recent perinatal studies have added to the knowledge of the first three months of life.

Since Freud (1905) emphasized the mouth as the focal point of the infant's interest and described the oral phase of libido development,