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Theories of development evolve around explicit or implicit questions. One of the first major questions asked by psychoanalysts beginning with Freud was what childhood must be like to account for the development of neuroses and psychoses. One answer was that it must be sensation centered, first orally, then anally, and then in the phallic—urethral or clitoral—urethral area. Another answer is that it must be relationally centered along the lines of pathological conditions: an autistic or narcissistic stage, a stage of symbiosis, followed by a stage of separation—individuation, or a paranoid—schizoid position, followed by a depressive position. Other conceptions speak of an undifferentiated state of id and ego, or of the absence of self and object boundaries, of primary masochism or sadism, autoeroticism, omnipotence, and the like—all patterned after pathological states. Alternatively, infant researchers ask a more phenomenological question: What can the developing child do? They have focused their observations and designed ingenious research techniques to answer this question. The answers have been startling to many analytic theoreticians—while probably less so to mothers—although Brazelton (1980) reports that many a mother says to him, “I didn't know my baby could do that,” as he puts the baby through his or her paces.
The following are some of the answers these studies have provided. Neonates will organize the 24-hour time period into discrete mental states of quiescent wakefulness, alert wakefulness, crying, and rapid-eye-movement