The Violation of Expectancies

The term “violation of expectancies” is derived from empirical studies of early development by Beebe and Lachmann. It referred, in their lexicon, to the interaction of mother and infant, organized by disruptions and efforts to resolve these breaches. This article expands the term's meaning to include a broad range of disruptive experiences, occurring not only in infancy but throughout the life cycle. The author's premise is that a developmental continuity exists between infant states and adult psychopathological states. This requires that we look in infancy for beginnings of states that we recognize as existing later on. The author provides a detailed review of infancy research, so as to give credence and support to the significance of the concept of violation of expectancy, and how these violations play a dominant role in the thematic and nuanced reverberations of our lives and in the intersubjective context of our experience. The concept of trauma derives from a one-person psychology, and is connected to unconscious fantasy, conflict and compromise formation, whereas “violation of expectancy” is a relational concept, based on mother-child interactions and originating within an intersubjective context. The author provides three case examples of violation of expectancy and their reverberations: The first involves early and repeated disruption in infancy, the second occurs in a relatively intact child, and the third derives from an autobiographical character.