PART III   /  A History of I

The I is a way of relating. To be sure, we often think of a Dr. Vincent or a Sigmund Freud standing alone, as it were, against a photographer's white backdrop. Yet, really, they are always in a world of people and things--and time.

Part II dealt with the ways we form an I out of momentary acts of seeing and hearing and knowing and remembering, an individual and psychological I. Part III explores the ways we make an I and a life out of the biology and culture we inherit, a historical I, an I in years, an I in a world of other people.

The geneticist C. H. Waddington describes plants and animals as involved in three time scales. The smallest time scale measures in seconds and hours, the middle scale in years, and the largest in decades, centuries, even eras and eons. The largest is evolution. A horse comes from a long line of ancestors and gives rise to a long line of descendant horses, all of them implicit in this one horse's history. In the shortest time scale, a horse lives in gallops and heartbeats and the munching of oats, immediate transformations of chemical energies. On the medium scale, writes Waddington, when we see a horse pulling a cart past the window, "the picture must also include the minute fertilised egg, the embryo in its mother's womb, and the broken-down old nag it will eventually become" (1957, p. 6).

With seeing, hearing, speaking, remembering, and knowing, we have been thinking mostly in the short scale. These particular, momentary DEFTings, however, happen in a social, linguistic, and even evolutionary world that long outlasts any one of us. We also have the middle scale, our gestation, infancy, adult life, and aging in a long arc of uncertain beginning but all too definite end.

What Freud and later psychoanalysts added to these three scales was a method--free association--for tracing systematically the way traits established in early childhood can steer an adult life. Hence Freud was offering a way of relating the middle scale, a lifetime, to the shortest scale, our second by second living. Similarly Freud's insistence on grounding psychology in biology gave a way of relating the single life to the evolutionary scale. Psychoanalysis thus gave rise to--and inherited--systematic ways of thinking about human character but also created some radically new ways of[159] tracing the history of a self, an I in time, starting at birth or even before, new

Characterologies

We all recognize that humans go through a life cycle from womb to tomb. We pass through certain obvious stages, infancy, adolescence, young adulthood, maturity, middle age, old age, and death. Yet within that trajectory, a person smiles or walks in a certain "characteristic" way; falls in love only with certain kinds of people; works in a particular style; engages his society in some ways but not others. As children, we develop a style that one can trace through all the later biological and social stages. The problem of human "character" is to account for both that persistence and the changes in our lifelong parabola of recurring traits and patterns.

A characterology offers a system for understanding these persistences, usually by interrelating them. In its eighty-odd years of existence, psychoanalysis has used four characterologies. Each constitutes a way of grouping details of behavior into a total personality. Each seeks a unity in the personality but in different ways.

The first predates psychoanalysis and serves still: diagnostic categories. We can speak of a paranoid personality, an obsessional neurotic, or an autistic child, applying any of the scores of categories offered by the handbooks of psychiatry. The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, for example (the 1968 edition), provides 168 possible diagnoses, and the DSM III offers even more. Such categories do not in themselves suggest how the paranoia or the obsession came about, but they do fit the medical model: diagnosis, treatment, prognosis. They lend themselves nicely to the prescribing of drugs, for example.

Psychoanalysis, however, quickly went beyond the categorizing of mental illness, however, to engage the dynamic causes behind symptoms, and in doing so Freud made one of his discoveries that never fails to awe me. Not only do we go through stages like youth and old age in adult life, we go through a series of stages in childhood: oral, anal, urethral, phallic, oedipal. Children are much concerned with the processes and products and persons associated with key parts of the body: giving and getting through the mouth, the actions and results of defecation and urination, being "big," standing erect, walking, having genital sensations, loving and hating male and female parents, or wanting to be a grown-up, that is, a parent oneself.

Freud's analyses of adults showed these themes persisting all through life but transformed into adult activities: anal pedantry or miserliness, oral smoking, phallic flying, or oedipal jealousy. It was possible by listening to adults' free associations in analysis to trace roots for the grown-up's actions in the child's development. The method also brings traits together, quite[160] strikingly, by means of a body model: the withholding of an "anal character" or the intrusiveness of a "phallic character" or the dependency of an "oral personality." The holistic evidence Freud and his early colleagues obtained from adults for these connections was quite overwhelming, and now experimenters have "objectively" confirmed these traits (Masling and Schwartz, 1979).

The stages are quite visible--once they are pointed out. Analysts or just simple nursemaids, as Freud said, were able to see them. Further, although different cultures may stress different phases differently, the sequence remains the same. No one suggests, for example, that children go through an oedipal phase before an oral one. Hence, the whole sequence of stages may represent a biological program we inherit.

A second characterology, then, classifies adults by the childhood stage that colors their adult life, the stage at which (we might say) considerable psychic energy became fixated: an "oral" personality, a "phallic" character. More psychoanalytic than psychiatric, such descriptions assume that normal development is progressive (or "epigenetic," developing according to some complex blueprint, not just "getting bigger"). Conversely, pathology is fixation or regression, getting stuck at one stage or retreating to it.

This method of understanding character became one of the five fundamental principles of psychoanalysis, those large "metapsychological" generalizations that a full clinical interpretation or theory should admit. The genetic point of view says that a psychoanalytic explanation of any phenomenon should "include propositions concerning its psychological origin and development" (Rapaport and Gill, 1959, p. 158; Rapaport, 1960b). The genetic point of view thus states Freud's determinism in a stern and vigorous way: "At each point of psychological history the totality of potentially active earlier forms co-determines all subsequent psychological phenomena." "All psychological phenomena," say Rapaport and Gill, "originate in innate givens which mature according to an epigenetic groundplan," that is, a step by step process of elaborating structures built into the organism.

Falling in love comes from earlier experiences of love, with mother, say, or father, which in turn involve other events in childhood that are enmeshed in these apparently biological oral, anal, phallic stages. Further, a child's need to be erect, to be big, to be capable, to be like mother or father, persists into adulthood. Hence the child's style will likely persist in the adult's life even if the content of that adult life becomes very different from the parents' life. "The earlier forms of a psychological phenomenon, though superseded by later forms, remain potentially active" (ibid).

On the evidence, I find this genetic hypothesis sound when stated generally this way. It does, however, point always toward childhood and toward biology, saying little about adult achievements. It has no way of showing[161] how some traits, even if they look pathological, can be adaptive, particularly in an artistic context. It was an "id-characterology" or, as Erikson was to criticize it many years later, an "originology" (1958a, p. 18).

A third type of characterology would define personality more by the actions of the grown-up. It focuses on the adult's preferred defenses and adaptations. Many analysts, starting in the thirties, have suggested this approach. A recent example is George Vaillant's book describing the "Grant Study," which traced thirty-year histories of Harvard graduates of the class of 1939. Each individual's style (and prospects of success) the researchers define by the kind of defenses he uses. Samuel Lovelace, for example, Vaillant described as a "lonely, gentle, loyal liberal with an unhappy marriage and few social supports," a "man who used intellectualization as a dominant defense." Thus Vaillant combines his cramming before exams in college--useless but it gave him "reassurance"--with his statement that in the army he engaged in a "sociological study of my fellow soldier." His marriage was painful, but "abstractly, I feel the same fascination I did before marriage." "Through my wife's illness, I learned what a complicated thing the human personality can be." "You can even rationalize Adolf Hitler" (1977, p. 135).

Vaillant traces the life history of such an individual by the way one defense (or adaptation) evolves into or takes the place of another, more mature or more successful. Lovelace's isolation of his loving emotions led to loneliness, but another man, a college dean, by isolating his anger, became a highly successful mediator in the turbulent universities of the 1960s (pp. 132-35).

One could achieve a still closer description of the individual by combining characteristic defense with libidinal phase, the third characterology with the second. It is true, for example, that "oral" characters, concerned with taking into themselves, often use identification as a defense and adaptation. "Anal" characters, preoccupied with the backsides of things, often reverse or overcompensate their impulses. Such a combination would live up to Fenichel's classic definition of character: "The ego's habitual modes of adjustment to the external world, the id, and the superego, and the characteristic types of combining these modes with one another, constitute character." Character is "the habitual mode of bringing into harmony the tasks presented by internal demands and by the external world" (1945, p. 467).

This is an "ego-psychological" idea of character, and, by including the "external world," it ends the idea of character as wholly internal to the individual. Fenichel's definition sets character in relation both to other characters and to the physical world exterior to the self, building on Heinz Hartmann's classic Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1939).[162]

Hartmann uses "adaptation" in analogy to evolution or ecology, not in the reactionary sense that one should "adjust" to the way society is. Humans fit into the world of people and things around them the way butterflies or giraffes evolve so as to camouflage themselves and then live in environments where they are camouflaged. So people work their way into the social world around them, sometimes altering that world to make it suit, sometimes changing themselves, but always making the two "fit together" (zusammenpassen).

Hartmann was introducing a new metapsychological principle. As Rapaport and Gill state it, "The adaptive point of view demands that the psychoanalytic explanation of any psychological phenomenon include propositions concerning its relationship to the environment" (1959, p. 159).

Hartmann emphasized adaptation to the physical world. Erikson (in his masterwork, Childhood and Society [1950, 1963]) emphasized adaptation to the social environment. Thus it was natural for him to extend the original sequence of childhood phases (oral, anal, and so on) into the whole human life span. He added a midlife period of creative work and reproduction and the end of life with its accumulation of wisdom. Society meets all such stages with characteristic institutions. Mothers mother infants, parents train toddlers, the community allows adolescents a time to find themselves, and society acknowledges (sometimes) the wisdom of its elders. Each stage was therefore not just psychological but psychosocial. I read Erikson as both enlarging and particularizing the idea of adaptation as Hartmann had left it.

In effect, Erikson, Hartmann, and others (the English object-relations theorists and Lacan) were all following through the opening Freud created in the first chapter of Civilization and its Discontents (1930). By suggesting that the infant's, the lunatic's, the lover's, or the mystic's ego might extend beyond itself to include some part of the external world, he radically opened psychoanalysis from a psychology of one individual bounded by his skin to a psychology of the individual in and including a social context.

Earlier, in Group Psychology, he had written: "The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology . . . loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely." "In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology . . . is at the same time social psychology as well" (1921c, 18:69). Freud could almost have been echoing Marx: "It is above all necessary to avoid . . . establishing 'society' as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being" (1844).

Lichtenstein's theme and variations concept of identity offers what seems to me a fourth and still more powerful way of relating the interpersonal and the intrapersonal in stating the unity of a personality. We can use a theme[163] and variations to put into words a consistency between, say, Scott Fitzgerald's way of falling in love and his use of un- and in-in his writing, between his interpersonal and his personal traits. Just as the third characterology of defense, adaptation, and drive included and enlarged upon the second characterology of drive alone, so this fourth mode includes and enlarges upon the third.

In the first three characterologies (diagnostic, childhood phase, ego strategies) the two that are psychoanalytic point to a historical I, an I in time. Earlier psychological events cause later ones, and the adult is to the child as effect is to cause. The fourth characterology, identity, makes it possible for me to open that determinism up. How much are we determined by our history and our biology? Just what is the process of this determinism? Does the evident continuity in my life-style leave a space for my creativity and freedom?

Development as Hike

For the process by which an animal's biological qualities fit into its environment, the geneticist C. H. Waddington introduced an intriguing metaphor, the "epigenetic landscape." He drew a picture of development as a surface like that of a sloping landscape with hills and valleys. He imagined the organism with its biological properties as a large round boulder rolling down these slopes. The boulder would go to the left or right as a certain hill would force it to roll into this or that valley on either side. Having gone to the left, the boulder would encounter the next hill on the left which would again force a choice of left or right, and so on down the whole geological pattern.

The landscape represented the environment as the animal might or might not fit into it. Rolling down a valley would represent a forced line of development: to survive, the animal has to develop along these lines. Not being able to roll up a hill would image an impossible line of development. Settling into a hollow would represent a successful ecological balance between animal and environment, an ecological niche.

Erikson may have had a similar figure in mind when he used the word "groundplan." For both Erikson and Waddington "epigenetic" implies a schedule. Certain developments must take place at certain stages, just as a certain hill in the landscape requires a boulder to roll to left or right. That outcome determines the next hill to be encountered, which will in turn require new outcomes.

Waddington's figure of something rolling down a geometric surface like a ball going through a pinball machine accents the evolutionary and biological time scale in which the individual plays a relatively passive role. If we consider the individual life span rather than the evolution of the species, the[164] individual or his culture has much more say as to what hills he will encounter. To be sure, the early moves favor some futures over others, but the individual chooses those moves, or his culture (rather than his biology) prescribes them. To model this shorter time scale, we might think of someone playing through a golf course. Perhaps an even better figure would be that of an explorer hiking his way through what life must be to each of us, a new territory.

We begin our hike abruptly, landing like parachutists on an alien terrain of physical and social surroundings already formed. In the first stages of the trek we carry only the materials we started with, our heredity. After the very earliest stages, however, our trek begins to have a history. We come to the next hill having marched down a number of the valleys that represent experiences we have had. We have fed, slept, known contentment, and felt nurtured. These experiences have changed us and our feelings about the hike. As a result of those experiences and of our growing equipment of memories and skills, we will choose this way or that as we search out the paths around some new hill. If our parents send us to a nursery school, that choice forecloses some futures and favors others. We will learn differently thereafter, perhaps better, perhaps worse--that depends on the individual and the school. Nursery school will have provided new sights and sounds to add to this continuously developing combination of self and landscape which is our trek. Kindergarten, then first grade, new friends and games, crushes and quarrels, they all both require and permit new relations to the human and nonhuman realities around us. So with marriage and career, parenthood and grandparenthood. It is an ever-new self in this continuously developing trek that will choose at the next hill, and so on down the sloping landscape to the cliff of death, whose pull is relentless.

In general, all characterologies allow us to account for events that have taken place, often quite completely, but they do not give us a way to predict how Lanzer would react when Freud gave him food or recommended a novel or when he came upon a stone in his lady's road. One can look backwards and see how he became blocked, but it is harder, perhaps impossible, to look ahead and see how he might free himself. Both Waddington's landscape and Erikson's groundplan are retrodictive, not predictive.

Partly, we can imagine human development as each of us facing a biological and cultural environment forced on us, like death or my height or the economic and technological forces of our culture, which none of us seems to be able to change. Partly, however, we choose our environment from alternatives that are given us, as when I chose to be a college professor as that profession existed in America in the 1950s. Partly we choose even more freely from alternatives we make up ourselves, as when I write this paragraph. All these fates and choices in their varying degrees and kinds of[165] freedom cumulate to become a history of my "I" which is the "I" that actively chooses the next word or passively enjoys a sunny December in Florida.

The landscape we hike through has certain large features that are the same for all of us. We are born, grow, ripen, and die. We pass through the oral, anal, and other childhood stages that Freud and the psychoanalysts discovered. Some features of the landscape are normal, but not everyone shares them. Some of us mate. Some of us find satisfying work. Some of us grow beards, and some shave them off.

Still other features of the landscape depend wholly on early choices, hence are largely individual. Having decided to be a college professor, I found myself marching up the ritual stages of assistant, associate, and full professor. Someone who had chosen advertising, acting, or acupuncture would never have hiked those particular hills and valleys. Having decided to be an unconventional college professor, I have always taught in unconventional departments, and that implied still other rises and falls in my professorial trek. Others are unconventional, too, but only I have written this particular book, and nobody else will feel the consequences down the trail as I will.

Freud and the first generation of psychoanalysts stressed the biological features of the landscape we I's are exploring. They are indeed the most fixed, and a landscape represents them well. Erikson, with his groundplan, stressed the social and communal aspects of development, making it the same biologically for all of us (infancy, generativity, old age) but a somewhat different epigenetic groundplan for each culture. In effect, an Indian baby walks toward adulthood over one terrain and a Canadian baby another. Again, the metaphor of a hike through a landscape represents a culturally "epigenetic" growth fairly well.

Erikson emphasized the social and communal aspects of the terrain. Part of Jacques Lacan's importance is that he demands we see that landscape as a cultural and verbal one. Lacan, despite his claims to the contrary, is writing in the tradition of the late Freud, Hartmann and Erikson, and the English object relations theorists. Lacan begins, as they do, with the relation of mother to infant. He thinks, as they do, that in the first six months of life the infant feels merged with the person who nurtures it. Then, during what Lacan calls the mirror stage, from six to eighteen months, the infant perceives that nurturing Other as simply an extension of itself. As the child is forced to recognize that the Other is not and cannot be a part of itself, it accepts le non du père or le nom du père, the cultural world of language which both represents its frustrated desire and provides the means to overcome it. Hence, where Hartmann spoke of "average expectable environment" and Erikson of society and community, Lacan speaks of language, but in the largest sense, as a network of signifiers and signifieds by which we[166] can describe our culture. The child must enter that network and let that network enter him (1979, see also Muller and Richardson, 1982, Wollheim, 1979).

In a remarkable anthropological film called Four Families, which features the commentary of Margaret Mead, we can see culture flowing before our very eyes through the mother and the family into the baby (MacNeill, 1959). The film compares families in four different societies: Indian, French, Japanese, and Western Canadian. Each of the four families is rural and farms, and each has a one year old boy baby, but the differences in their physical and cultural worlds are immense.

The Canadian family is surrounded by noisy machines like the vacuum cleaner and the washer-dryer with their cold, hard surfaces of metal and porcelain. The other families are machineless, while the Indian family has scarcely a wall to its house. The Canadian family, by contrast, has to have a special transitional space between indoors and outdoors for taking off overcoats and snowsuits. The Indian family in its tropical hut has no boundary at all between indoors and outdoors. The Indian mother gives her baby's body religious markings, but it is the French father who makes the sign of the cross over the bread before the evening meal. The Japanese mother prays before the ancestors' shrine, but in the Canadian family the youngest child says grace. The Canadian baby goes to sleep in a room by himself, while the other three share the common living space of the family. The Indian father spends his evening in the village, the other three at home. The French and Canadian mothers bathe their babies vigorously, handling them dispassionately, almost like packages. The Indian mother bathes her baby caressingly, sensuously. The Japanese baby gets his bath when his grandmother takes him into the bathtub with her. All of these variations provide the baby with a sense of the way his world is and shall be.

This is how we learn what nurture is and love, what closeness means, how valuable religion is, what the relation is between indoors and out, between animate and inanimate nature, what is important--virtually every basic thing we know. The message is culture, but the medium is body, the bodies of all the family, but especially the mother's and the baby's. Culture sets limits, to be sure: one cannot live in a tropical hut in Alberta in March, nor can the Alberta family shed its need for achievement. Culture provides a style for living and mothering, and it would be rare, if not impossible, for a mother to change it deep down. Yet each baby knows that style of mothering only as each mother translates it to the baby through her own identity. Further, the mother is herself the result of a style of mothering achieved through culture as embodied in her mother.

One can see such a style not only in the baby's physical relationships, but also more abstractly, in its perception of the world, its sense of time, space,[167] objects, its basic conceptions of the universe. As Jules Henry says:

When one is imbued in this way--as if sun, water and time were filtered to one through the body of another person--it becomes difficult to change one's perceptions, for change would be a kind of death--a detachment from the person through whom the universe was absorbed. Thus consciousness itself is learned and acquired through another person. From the time we are born we are taught how to be conscious. Consciousness is a sociocultural phenomenon, and the consciousness of a Pilaga Indian baby is therefore very different from that of an American one (1972, p. 60).

Unfortunately, our metaphors for this internalizing of culture, this making it a part of each of our personalities, are not very cogent. As Henry points out, "teach" and "learn" hardly convey the idea of contacting one's universe through another person. If we say, "nature and nurture combine" or if we speak of "social factors," we sound as though culture was simply added or multiplied into some preexisting personality. At other times we refer to our "cultural heritage," as though it were a possession that could be bequeathed. Still other metaphors introduce the idea of social "pressure" or "impact" or "forces" as though we could model the process by images from freshman physics.

Social values cannot become a part of the baby's world so simply or directly. My own metaphors for the infant's developing into a social being--culture flows, culture permeates and pervades, culture sets limits, culture is the message--may be somewhat, but only somewhat, better. More telling would be metaphors that imply a complex transformation in which culture determines a social style of biological mothering which each mother translates through her own individual personality to a baby who combines it with its own unique heredity.

Waddington's evolutionary landscape is suggestive, but gives too fixed a picture. The landscape does have certain fixed features (like the childhood stages), but also we each have our own landscape, which (in the triad of Kluckhohn and Murray) may share features with everybody else's, somebody else's, or nobody else's. The developmental landscape is simultaneously deterministic and undeterministic, "objective" and "subjective," and universal, cultural, and individual. That's asking a lot of a landscape. How can one imagine a terrain that has certain features for all humanity, others for Americans, other features for college professors, and still others for just me?

I think the two levels of feedback developed in part II provide a better metaphor. An identity using certain cultural codes which in turn use the[168] body will image what happens between the mothers and children of Four Families. The baby's needs draw out of his mother a culture that becomes part of the baby. In fulfilling the baby's needs, she endows the baby with cultural loops as her identity uses those loops. Thus the baby internalizes the culture but specifically its mother's version of that culture. It is like learning The Star-Spangled Banner by hearing only Charles Ives's version or Puccini's.

With such a feedback model in mind, consider Anni Bergman's description of an American baby boy and the effect of his mother's state of mind:

Jason was a boy who could not outgrow the elated state accompanying the feeling that he could conquer the world. He was a motor-minded little boy who started to walk freely at the early age of nine months. His mother was a depressed woman with a rather poor image of herself. It was most important that her son be precocious, a narcissistic completion of herself. . . . Jason's mother, in awe of her fledgling, . . . seemed to impart to her son the idea that he could manage no matter what. She did not temper his age-appropriate feeling of omnipotence with her own ability to be a rational judge of danger. She allowed him total freedom, and Jason never seemed to learn to be a judge of danger himself. Recklessly he would throw himself into space. He was forever falling but, interestingly, he hardly ever cried. It as was if the sense of omnipotence and of his own invulnerability dwarfed his physical pain (Bergman, 1978, pp. 156-57).

I think the double feedback picture is useful, but I also think Lacan and Lichtenstein are right when they suggest using language as a model for this individualizing of the general human fate to form an I. The interrelation of baby and mother is a cultural and verbal one. Jason's mother is, as it were, feeding back his behavior to him in the language of the American kitchen, bedroom, or television set. Further, a society that itself likes to hurl things into space may applaud both her and Jason for his bodily recklessness, giving them a reinforcing positive feedback. English society, less committed to change, speed, and the taking of risks, might make Jason and his mother uncomfortable with their lack of restraint.

Lacan accents the linguistic aspect of human development, and since we can only think about these questions of nature and nurture in language, I[169] think we can improve the feedback model by recasting it in linguistic terms. Erikson spoke of the biological and social landscape or groundplan as posing "tasks" we all face. We might introduce into his metaphor a Sphinx that poses us riddles at crucial junctures. Questions and answers, moreover, embody a feedback process. Oedipus had to solve the Sphinx's riddle before he could enter the gates of Thebes. So with each of us. We each must solve the childhood riddles of how to postpone gratification or how to control impulses or how to turn passive experiences into active ones before we can go on to the next stage. We must choose a career before we can progress in it. We must acquire a child before we can become a parent.

We could say that development asks us questions. Some of these questions all humans face. Some occur only in certain cultures. Others are unique to one person. All of them, however, we hear first in the individual body language of one particular mother and one particular baby, then later in the style of one particular I.

The answers an I gives to one particular question, for example, how to reverse passive into active, will "determine" the way the individual hears the next question. One answer by an I "determines" (in the loose way that the two sides of a dialogue "determine" each other) the question from the environment in response, which in turn determines (in that same loose way) the next answer by the I. The answers we give affect the next questions, making some more likely and foreclosing others. We find our way through a conversation in much the same way that we take this path or that through a landscape.

The Canadian family in Four Families was speaking to its baby not only in English, but in a language of vacuum cleaners and washing machines. The infant Shaw made loud noises. Iiro drew ducks and shoes and table lamps. We in turn try to understand these transactions in our own languages. We can talk about all these different individual versions of what is generically the same through a language which is both a function of our individual identities and a resource that we hold in common. I think then we can best model

Development as Dialogue

For example, we could look at Winnicott's interview with Iiro as a dialogue whose focus we could phrase as the boy's wish to be loved as he was, deformity unchanged. After that interview, Winnicott went on to talk to Iiro's mother (again through an interpreter "whose translation quickly[170] became forgotten by both of us"). Confessing for the first time her feelings about Iiro, she said,

I know that everyone has guilt feelings about sex. For me it has been different. All my life I have felt free sexually and in marriage sexual experience has been a fulfillment. Instead of feeling guilty about sex what I have always felt is that my condition of fingers and toes will be handed down to one of my children. In this way I would be punished. Since marriage, with each pregnancy I have become increasingly anxious about the baby that was to be born, anxious in terms of the inherited disability. I knew I must not have babies because of this disability. Each time when the baby is born and the baby is normal I feel immense relief. With Iiro, however, I had no relief because there he was with fingers and toes like mine and I had been punished. When I saw him I hated him. I completely repudiated him, and for a length of time (perhaps only twenty minutes or perhaps longer) I knew that I could never see him again. He had to be taken away from me. Then it came over me that I might get his fingers and toes mended by persistently using the orthop;aedic surgeon. I immediately decided to persist in getting Iiro's fingers and toes mended although this seemed impossible, and from that moment I found my love of him returning and I think I have loved him more than the others. From his point of view, therefore, it could be said that he gained something. Nevertheless I have been obsessed with this drive to use the orthop;aedic surgeon.

The dialogue of Iiro's development began with his unfortunate heredity and his mother's guilt. She translated a common adult guilt about sex into a more literal fear of consequences. At his birth, when the feared punishment seemed actually to happen, she managed to love Iiro by resolving to mend his fingers and toes through surgery. "You must change in order for me not to feel guilty but to love you"--this was the message she sent Iiro from his birth, and he responded in the way that a baby does. It would overimplify to say that the message "pressured" him or "shaped" him; those metaphors are too crudely deterministic. I think of the dyad this way: Iiro became the baby who could receive the message his mother was sending. He fit.[171]

Jules Henry describes that process as the baby's sending his mother* messages of contentment by his eyes' following her, by smiling, relaxing in her arms, gurgling or cooing. She in turn sends messages of her contentment: she cuddles him, gurgles and coos in baby talk, and follows him with her eyes. Mother and baby both show they know they are each giving the other something the other needs. Gradually, in the normal course of events, "love" messages replace the "contentment" messages. "Between the baby's inherent tendencies and the mother's requirements, a code is worked out . . . with neither mother nor child knowing that anything is being learned or taught." In effect, mother and baby learn to fit together (Hartmann's zusammenpassen), first in the business of feeding and sleeping and caring, later in their loving responsiveness to each other. The mother gives the baby the love and care he needs. He gives her something of himself in return, and in so doing learns to love (1972, 192-93).

The mother and infant have, of course, a paradoxical dialogue, since in the nature of things, it must be without words: infans is Latin for 'unspeaking.' Lichtenstein suggests, therefore, still a different figure of speech: "The way the mother is touching, holding, warming the child, the way in which some senses are stimulated, while others are not, forms a kind of 'stimulus cast' of the mother's unconscious, just as a blind and deaf person may, by the sense of touch, 'cast' the form and the personality of another person in his mind." Lichtenstein's idea of a "cast" of the relationship of baby and mother corresponds to the "mirroring experience" described by Lacan, Greenacre, and many other psychoanalytic authors without committing us to a primarily visual learning. Rather such a "cast" would be in its very body-ness the first "sexuality" in the classical psychoanalytic sense: pleasure from specific organs, not necessarily related to genitals or procreating. In this bodily relation, "while the mother satisfies the infant's needs, in fact creates certain specific needs, which she delights in satisfying, the infant is transformed into an organ or an instrument for the satisfaction of the mother's unconscious needs" (1977, pp. 76-78). Iiro becomes caught up in his mother's need to expiate her guilt through surgery, and Jason compensates for his mother's sense of her own inadequacy. Somehow the infant gains in the wordless preconscious dialogue between himself and his

No one has observed the bodily, sexual relationship between mother and baby more closely than Daniel Stern. By videotaping the interactions of mother and baby in feeding and diapering and holding, he has been able to analyze such things as "gaze behavior" to the millisecond. (We humans live in a world where a fraction of a second more or less in a "Hi!" is all the difference between "Hey! she likes me!" and "What's eating her?") He describes one such relationship--this one not "the normal course of events."

"I first met Jenny," writes Stern, "when she was almost three months old. Her mother was an animated woman . . . intrusive, controlling, and overstimulating by most standards. She seemed to want, need, and expect a high level of exciting, animated interaction. . . . Furthermore, the mother seemed to want the level she wanted when she wanted it." As a result, she was always pushing the level of Jenny's stimulation about as high as the baby would tolerate.

The dance [another metaphor!] they had worked out by the time I met them went something like this. Whenever a moment of mutual gaze occurred, the mother went immediately into high- gear. . . . [That is, in response to Jenny's gaze, she would loudly and eagerly start talking and making faces to her.] Jenny invariably broke gaze rapidly. Her mother never interpreted this temporary face and gaze aversion as a cue to lower her level of behavior, nor would she let Jenny self-control the level by gaining distance. Instead, she would swing her head around following Jenny's to reestablish the full-face position. Once the mother achieved this, she would reinitiate the same level of stimulation with a new arrangement of facial and vocal combinations. Jenny again turned away, pushing her face further into the pillow to try to break all visual contact. Again, instead of holding back, the mother continued to chase Jenny. The pillow and side wing of the infant seat now prevented the mother from swinging around to the face-to-face position. So this time, she moved closer, in an apparent attempt to break through and establish contact. She also escalated the level of her stimulation even more by adding touching and tickling to the unabated flow of vocal and facial behaviors. . . .

With Jenny's head now pinned in the corner, the baby's next recourse was to perform a "pass-through." She rapidly swung her face from one side to the other right past her mother's face. When her face crossed the mother's face, in the face-to-face zone, Jenny closed her eyes to avoid any mutual visual contact and only reopened them after the head aversion was established on the other side. All of these be-[173]haviors on Jenny's part were performed with a sober face or at times a grimace.

The mother followed her to the new side, producing volleys of stimulation that again progressively pushed Jenny's head farther away until she performed another pass-through. After a series of these "failures," the mother would pick the infant up from the infant seat and hold her under the armpits, dangling in the face-to-face position. This maneuver usually succeeded in reorienting Jenny toward her, but as soon as she put Jenny back down, the same pattern reestablished itself. After several more repeats of these sequences the mother became visibly frustrated, angry, and confused and Jenny, quite upset.

What is telling from the point of view of forming an I, however, is Stern's description of the years after Jenny and her mother had fit: "At each new phase of development Jenny and her mother have had to replay this basic scenario of overshoot and resolution, but with different sets of behaviors and at higher levels of organization." Stern does not use a theme-and-variations concept of identity, but he is here describing exactly the process I visualize for an identity's coming into being. Out of their fitting, mother and baby establish a theme for their relationship--"this basic scenario of overshoot and resolution" is Stern's phrase for it. The baby then becomes the baby that fits into that theme. I am the kind of child (or later, person) who always feels as though I am coping with too much. Even Stern's metaphor of a "scenario" echoes mine of a dialogue (1977, pp. 110-114).

The dialogue between mother and baby answers to a theme and variations reading just as the behavior of a single person does. Holistic readings can prove useful for the dyad here as well as for the self.

Indeed, if sufficiently skilled at "It fits" inferences, one can even read the individual baby holistically, although the media are often semiverbal or nonverbal. Here, for example, is Margaret Mahler's account of the behavior of Bruce, aged twenty-five months:

One morning, after having a bowel movement in his diaper, Bruce looked for his mother. When he could not find her, he picked up a book on trains, his favorite book; he pointed to a picture and talked about the[174] coal car which happened not to be in this particular picture. He knew the train had a coal car, even though it was not shown. Similarly, he had just looked for his mother but could not find her. Also, he had moved his bowels, which he felt in his diaper, but which he could not see. Subsequently he found another book and looked at the picture of a family. He pointed to and named the father and the boy, but he did not name the girl and mother who were also in the picture. Then he went to the toy mail box, pointed to the flap that had come off it, and then clearly enunciated: "doo-doo" (bowel movement). Subsequent to this he played with hollow blocks, putting a small one into a big one (quasi hiding it) and then putting them in order. Then he looked out the window, where he had often seen boys playing in the yard and said, "boy," even though nobody was in the play yard at this point. He called the observers' attention to all these parts that belong to a "syncretic whole," which at that moment, however, were missing or invisible. Thus, with his free associative sequence of words and actions, he disclosed his concern about missing part-objects or whole-objects, particularly the absent

Perhaps Mahler was aided by her prior knowledge of Bruce and Bruce's situation. Bruce always translated a lot of things into missing parts: "Bruce could not easily express his needs directly: he touched his mother while avoiding looking at her." Similarly, when his baby sister was born a few months earlier, he avoided the sight of his mother with the baby--as long as he could. Later, at thirty-three months, "Bruce liked to poke holes in the play dough, then cover them up, and say with great relief: 'Hole all gone.'"

Bruce's life involves one child's style interacting with events that many children share: the birth of a sister, fears about body losses, controlling his bowels, standing up, or walking. A central problem in understanding child development is to put the two different kinds of phenomena together, the unique and the shared. Sometimes we need to look at Bruce in isolation, as if he were in front of the photographer's blank backdrop. At other times we need to walk Bruce away from the backdrop and see him in the context of his mother, his family, and his society.

The classical if-then generalizations of psychoanalysis give us a way to talk about Bruce as being like many other children. The holistic analysis of individual themes and style gives us a way to talk about Bruce as a unique[175] individual. How can we put them together? I have suggested three models. Waddington and Erikson's "epigenetic landscape" or "groundplan" image an individual marching through a widely shared terrain. A two-tier feedback network models an individual identity making use of shared cultural and biological tools to act on and receive feedback from reality. Finally the model I prefer, dialogue, portrays one individual addressing people and things by means of the shared resource of language, hearing their answers in his own idiolect, and responding--feeding back--in turn.

By listening to the growth of a child as a dialogue, we are in a new position to explore the way an I comes into being. Identity--the I--as this I has been developing the idea, is:

--an agency that initiates a feedback response from the world outside the self;
--the cumulating consequence of that feedback;
--the topmost and pervading reference in a hierarchy of feedbacks;
--the verbal representation of the above triad as a theme and variations.

Late in his career, Freud put forward two hypotheses that have given rise to an immense body of research, greatly lengthening our perspective on early infancy. First, in 1930, in the opening chapter of Civilization and its Discontents, he asserted that the baby only gradually separates a self from the nurturing world around it. That slow differentiation provided the basis for all situations in later life in which the boundaries between self and other blur or dissolve entirely: mysticism, love, imaginations, or (I would add) the whole process of DEFTing.

Second, he acknowledged the importance of a major developmental phase prior to the oedipus complex. So momentous was his realization that he compared it to Sir Arthur Evans's discovery of a Minoan-Mycenaean civilization that had flourished ten centuries before the classical Greece we, and Freud, studied in school (1931b, 21:226). The early months form the geological substratum--or the basic fault--on which all subsequent development, including the oedipus complex, builds. I want to "read" both the older theories and the new knowledge in the light of "the I."

In psychoanalytic thought in general since Freud, the early relation between the infant and his mother has come to overshadow the later triangle of child, mother, and rival, even though Freud himself emphasized the triangle and discovered the dyad only near the end of his life. Indeed the whole tenor of the development of psychoanalysis after Freud's death has found more and more importance in the first year of life. This emphasis on the pre-oedipal marks one major difference between "Freudian" theory (in the strict sense of what Freud stated) and "psychoanalytic" theory (referring to the ongoing science Freud founded). It provides yet another bridge between psychoanalysis and regular psychology.

In recent years, there has been a virtual explosion of interest in the psychology of babies, often based on completely different methods. Daniel Stern is one among many "baby watchers" who are trying to understand children by direct observation. He videotapes the eloquent ballet between mother and infant as she feeds or bathes him or simply responds to his cry or his gaze, as, for example, he filmed the struggle around stimulation between Jenny and her mother. One mother will dart the bottle in and out of her[177] baby's lips. Another will slowly, lingeringly roll it round his mouth. Some other might doze as she gives the breast in a midnight feeding. Typically, a mother speaks to an infant in a slow, high voice that adult humans use in no other circumstances. She gazes at him as long as he is willing to look at her. It is he, not she, who turns away and so breaks off this communication through the eyes (1977). Jenny's mother, by contrast, forced her stimulation on the baby. Her intrusions defined their relationship, defined, in effect, Jenny.

The opposite of Stern, Jacques Lacan is a theorist who analyzes babies by reason rather than observation. For example, he has visualized the development of the I through a mirror phase (le stade du miroir). The baby perceives himself, in an actual mirror, as having a bodily unity which he feels inwardly is still lacking. The baby therefore identifies with this image. Unfortunately for the theory, babies do not behave this way with mirrors (Lewis and Brooks, 1975, p. 123). Rather than restrict human development to a particular experience of mirrors, however, I (like Winnicott) read Lacan's metaphor as referring to the mirroring that takes place between mother and baby. She reflects him back to himself, but through the wholeness she perceives or wishes to perceive in him. In either case, this first sense of self is a self through another, a self that is radically not the baby's actual, experienced self. Yet it is the basis for future growth. The I comes into being through otherness, Stern's conclusion, but reached in an entirely different way (1936).

Such new observations and theories from both psychoanalysis and psychology mean that we have more incisive ways of thinking about some of the traditional riddles of human nature. These particular riddles are especially pivotal because we have to think them through before we can reply to social and political questions on which millions of destinies hinge. Our social policies rest on our assumptions about the relative importance of heredity and environment or, in the neater phrase, nature vs. nurture.

Psychologists translate that contrast into the balancing of learning theories against nativist or rationalist theories. Do we learn to see or do we inherit that ability? Can a person who went through all the stages of childhood development deaf and then is granted hearing learn to hear as normal people do? Do we learn how to use language (as Piaget seems to maintain) or are we (as Noam Chomsky claims) biologically programmed with a certain linguistic capacity that defines and is defined by the universal features of all grammars? To the extent that we believe in learning theories, then we may believe efforts at political and social control will eventually succeed and seem natural. We may also believe that we can educate many more people and better than we presently do. If we believe in innate capacities, however, then any attempts to force or override them will seem tormenting and futile. There would be no point in making a special effort to[178] educate the children of the "underclass," no point in a Head Start program. We should simply learn to live with a lumpenproletariat.

In psychoanalysis, the nature-nurture enigma finds an equivalent in the debate between those analysts who hold to a "classical" drive theory, defining instincts physiologically, and those who have adopted the "English object-relations theory." Is the developing human being propelled by biological instincts (Triebe, properly "drives") with fixed stages associated with body zones (oral, anal, and so on), or should we say the infant is born into a relationship and all development, pleasure, learning, and adaptation must be defined within that and later relationships?

I do not see any necessary contradiction here. Drives presuppose objects, and objects presuppose drives. The relations between a baby and its objects must change as the baby's drives evolve, and the drives must change in relation to the baby's changing objects. Indeed the ego-psychologist David Rapaport thought one of Freud's outstanding ideas was making the object of a drive a defining characteristic of the drive (1960a, p. 202; see also Loch, 1977, p. 210).

The task for psychoanalysis, it seems to me, is to find ways for these two approaches to enrich each other, not cancel each other out as mutually exclusive. In the same way, I see the exciting discoveries of those who observe or test children as contributing to psychoanalytic knowledge, not competing with it.

The Baby-Watchers

Today's experimental psychologists have considerably revised William James's oft-quoted image of the newborn baby's world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion." Babies are capable of a lot more than we used to think.

To be sure, a newborn sees only percent of what an adult sees, but that provides "functionally useful" vision. Stern says the newborn baby's eyes are focused at eight inches, forming a "perceptual bubble," adapted to the perception of his mother's face during feeding and little else. Other experimenters, however, seem to suggest that babies are born with more perceptual capacity, abilities to see distances or the position of objects in three dimensions. Often, apparently, these abilities are lost and later relearned in another form, as though they were first innate, then learned in a more adaptive way in response to experience and other forms of knowledge.

After four months or more, the baby begins to be able to accommodate his vision for near and far objects, probably as a result of improved acuity (Atkinson and Braddick, 1981). Vision probably develops according to "a preset, presumably genetically determined program" (Held, 1981). Indeed[179] all of infant development probably takes place as part of the program by which the neurons in the body and brain grow their sheaths of myelin and begin to function as they do in adults (Freedman, 1981). From the very beginning, however, babies show they like to look at some things more than others, at curves and depths and many small events rather than a few large ones (Fantz et al., 1975).

The newborn's hearing is much more sophisticated than his vision. Films have shown infants as early as twenty minutes after birth spontaneously moving their bodies in time with speech (Condon, 1976; Condon and Ogstron, 1966). As one researcher remarks, if this observation proves true, it is surely one of the most significant discoveries of any modern science, because it suggests that we are by nature speaking animals and social beings. Infants do, in fact, have social exchanges from the very beginning. The days when a newborn first comes home from the hospital (in our culture) provide a period of intense negotiation during which mother and baby try to mesh their two schedules (Sander, 1969).

Babies can move their bodies in rhythm to speech at one day, and at one month they can distinguish a p from a b (Spieker, 1982). Moreover, a four-month-old baby apparently hears that difference not just as a random difference in the timing of the voice but as a difference in linguistic category. Again, the inference seems inescapable that we are born knowing that language is made up of discrete units (Eimas, 1975). From the moment we are born we are getting ready to speak.

Indeed, newborns either have or develop quickly a number of what I can only call intellectual categories. Babies recognize almost from the start whether something is familiar or not. Babies can also predict, and they are able to act in response to familiar events or, conversely, to expect events to occur in response to their own actions. All of this presupposes (to me) surprising capacities of association and memory (Papousek and Papousek, 1981). Babies seem to understand sameness, difference, cause, effect, and sequence from birth.

By the second month of life babies are able to recognize specific individuals and behave differently toward them (Lamb, 1981). From a psychoanalytic point of view, however, these persons are "part objects." Before two months, a baby's sight is drawn just to the greatest number or size of visible elements ("contour density"). According to the experimenters, a very young baby neither sees the object as a whole nor is sensitive to the arrangement of features. After all, vision at two months is 20/500 and at four months, 20/150. Also, because a baby has little stored information about pattern and form, no schemata for perception, he cannot at first see an object (or a person) as such, only as a sequence of features. Probably that is[180] the first meaning of an "other" for us: a figure or pattern or, more exactly, the feeling of alternately scanning and focusing on a sequence of critical features (Salapatek, 1975).

An eight-to-ten week old baby will kick and continue kicking to keep a mobile spinning (Suomi, 1981). That is, the baby can perceive events as events and act in response to them. It "perceives contingency," in psychological jargon, and again that implies some sophistication of concepts.

One of the most important of the baby's early concepts was "faceness," the invariant configuration of eyes, nose, and mouth. At four months, the eyes are the most salient feature of a face and "faceness" is not yet established, but by five months, a baby could recognize distortions of the mouth or inversions of the nose. An infant evolves a "face configuration," and that means the baby can understand the facial communication patterns that adults use (Campos and Stenberg, 1981). A four month old can tell whether a person he sees speaking is the source of the voice he hears by detecting the relation in time between face movements and the voice. A four month old knows that a speaking face normally goes with a speaking voice (Spelke and Cortelyou, 1981).

Around this time babies make another major cognitive leap. Before twelve weeks, experimentalists find only "very spotty" evidence (despite all claims of adoring and delighted mothers) that a baby knows the difference between its mother and a stranger. Somewhere between twelve and twenty weeks, however, that ability clearly and decisively appears.

Smiling helps in this. Babies start smiling toward human voices by one month and toward faces at three months, choosing between faces by four months. In general, babies show a spurt of response to all social stimuli around four months and, most important, they begin to show expectations about persons (Olson, 1981).

All of this shows the development of a rudimentary "person concept" (Olson, 1981). Conversely, a disruption of this interaction with persons spells trouble, as, for example, with blind children who cannot elicit or return the loving gazes that ordinarily pass between parent and child. For these unfortunate children, the risk of autism (a complete breakdown of development and interaction) greatly increases--unless their parents are taught to recognize and use other signs of interaction (Freedman, 1981).

It is clear, then, that infants have from the very start far more sophisticated abilities to sense and think about the world than people just a few years ago believed. From the outset, they have some sort of inborn, nonverbal mechanism for knowing, that is, for representing in their minds the concepts they are developing and by which they organize their environment into a world that is full of differences and meanings. From the first hours after birth[181] they are able to draw on concepts in order to perceive, and their perceptions sophisticate those concepts in turn. In short, they engage in the same kind of feedback as adults who are DEFTing.

For example, studies of how infants perceive physical things show concepts shaping perceptions. A baby up to five months old ceases to look for a rattle placed on a table or, in general, any object placed on another, larger object. The infant ceases to look for it. Why? In general, when a five-month old tries to find a vanished object, how the object disappeared is important. If it disappeared on a trajectory, the infant can follow the object and will look for it. If, however, someone throws a blanket over it, the object has, as it were, ended. It is "inside" and the infant has no concept for inside. Similarly, if one puts an object under a transparent cup, it ends. The rattle on the table is "inside" that way and it, too, simply ends. With a seven-month-old infant, if one places a small object on the palm of his hand, he will close his hand over the object and that puts the object out of sight. The infant will then act as if the object no longer existed; eventually he just drops it. "Inside" doesn't mean anything yet, even if it is inside the baby's own hand. In other words, a seven-month old has a concept of trajectory but not yet of inside, and psychologists can watch the latter concept come into being (Bower, 1975). Before it does, a baby simply does not have the same kind of spatial sense we adults have.

A great many concepts have to come into being before we can say an infant has begun to establish human relationships. For example, a baby has to learn that others can be relied on or that it is itself capable of affecting its environment, indeed is in partial control of its experiences. A baby has to have some notion of its mother's continued existence despite her momentary absence for us to say that the baby is crying in order to bring her back. Then, once these concepts do come into being, a baby begins to have a more active and intentional role in its relations with other people (Lamb, 1981).

The experimental baby-watchers have made, then, at least one very important point. Emotional and cognitive development go together. Cognitive skills make emotional relations possible, and emotional relations motivate cognitive skills.

The crucial event in their mutual progress takes place usually by the third quarter of the first year of life: a baby begins to have a sense of the permanence of persons (Lamb, 1981). Once it does, it begins to have a sense of its own self. In psychoanalytic thinking, this is self-object differentiation, the basis for all relations with others and all sense of self. Piaget dated this watershed later, but it appears that the psychoanalysts' surmise was correct: the eighth or ninth month (Gouin Décarie, 1965).

To its parents, a baby's newfound sense of self and other shows as "stranger anxiety," fear or crying at the presence of adult strangers, male or[182] female, but not, normally, of the mother. Interestingly, babies do not show stranger anxiety to other infants, evidence that their fears proceed from a genuine concept of who and what the others are. A twelve-month old who is looking through magazines or newspapers with pictures of adults will sometimes point at them and say "baby," showing that he is judging size per se. He is not compensating as we would for the reduction of a person to the size of a page, but he is fitting the apparent size of these persons into a one-year old's concept of person (Lewis and Brooks-Gunn, 1982).

Indeed by the end of the first year, you could say a baby has something like a full-fledged theory of mind. The one-year old, for example, understands that people have identity over time despite changes in location or behavior ("Daddy at work," "Mommy mad"). The baby knows that you have to influence people by asking for things or telling them. ("Watch me.") Hence the baby knows that people are self-moving. People identify one another (for example, by correctly using pronouns). People sense things within a limited perceptual field. Outside that field, things are not perceived. ("Did you see me jump in?") People have intentions ("I want") and moods ("Daddy loves me." "Mommy is sad"). People postpone or restrain or retain or repeat behaviors. ("Daddy will come home." "I can go home"--and can says the baby knows about what psychologists label "action potentials.") People share rules about what is[183] appropriate and who can do what, when, and how. ("Norman is a good boy." "That's Daddy's hat.") In general, the one-year-old understands that people communicate messages through words and gestures. These are related to context, although not always unambiguously. Indeed, you have to infer the internal states of others. ("Are you mad, Daddy?") All in all, the one-year old has a fairly sophisticated theory of persons, although, obviously, he could not express it in abstractions like the ones in this paragraph (Bretherton et al., 1981). You could even say that he knows about as much about people as the psychologist knows about one of the rats in his mazes.

Most important, the one year old is beginning to detect genders and by two years will have made gender identity a part of his own self-identity. A basic principle in the child's development of self is "I will act like others who are like me," the principle of "attraction of like" (the opposite of magnets). The motivational system of the child thus rests at least partly on the ability to distinguish types of people and to decide to be like them. Thus the infant constructs sex-roles from the biological and cultural differences around him: hair length, type of clothes, different first names, work patterns, and so on. These cues provide information for differentiating oneself from others. Then the principle of "attraction of like" comes into play, and the child moves toward conformity in sex-role behavior. Each new behavior the child adopts provides a further basis for establishing what is like and what is unlike. Hence sex-role behavior tends to feed back onto itself, leading the child further and further into one gender or the other (Lewis, 1981).

Not only does a baby have a theory of the human and of gender by the end of the first year, he has begun to evolve his own personal style (Yarrow, 1982). From the beginning babies are active, information-processing organisms, engaged in feedback with their environment. They try to reach objects and get responses from them, preferring novelty and change to a static environment. Hence reaching out to people or to objects tends to be self-reinforcing. This positive feedback leads to a "generalized expectancy model," a belief that one can affect one's environment (notably through "contingent mother-infant interaction," in the jargon). This trust provides the basis for a personal style, that is, continuing some behaviors or, if you will, a way of DEFTing that the baby finds successful. It seems likely that even newborns have some rudimentary sense of self, developed out of the consistency and regularity of and the feedback from the baby's own actions. For example, each time a baby closes its eyes, the world become black. A self does that. In the same way, a self feels pain. A self makes the pain stop. Mother reflects back what I--a self--do (Lewis and Brooks-Gunn, 1982).

Also, by the end of the first year, infants have probably developed a sense of the styles of the people around them (their "behavioral propensities," in the jargon). Erikson's notion of basic trust, for example, presupposes that the baby can distinguish between the various people around him and predict their different responses to him. Infants develop different relations with their mothers than with their fathers. They also generalize from their experiences with parents to new people, trying out the social modes they know from their parents on newcomers. That generalizing means that a one-year old has developed a style discernible to the observing psychologist (Lamb, 1981), and that, from the point of view of this book, is an identity.

In all this vigorous experimenting, John Bowlby is an important influence with his concept of attachment, which he defines as an affectional tie from one person to another, binding them together in space and time. Bowlby was trying to situate the early mother-child relation in an updated psychoanalytic instinct theory, as grounded as Freud could have wished in biology and ethology. From observing primitive peoples and ground-living apes, Bowlby suggested that the baby's attachment to the mother served to protect the infant from predators and other dangers, balancing closeness to the mother with the child's necessary adventurousness.

Bowlby traced four stages in a modern baby's attachment. Until three months, a baby uses his behavioral repertoire, sucking, grasping, looking, smiling, and so on, to bring any person in his environment nearer to him, in general, to relate socially to any human around him. From three to six months, a baby clearly discriminates between his mother and other persons,[184] wanting her near but not wanting the rest the same way. From six or seven months on, a baby becomes more active and takes more initiative in relating to people. Bowlby says the baby has become "goal-directed," changing its strategies according to the reactions of the other persons. This is the period when, according to Bowlby, a baby is truly "attached" and, in regular psychoanalytic theory, true object-relations begin--a baby relates to others as others and feels its self as a self. Finally, in a fourth period, beginning about three, the baby begins to be able to infer things about his mother's goals, and the give and take of mother and child becomes much more intense (1951, 1958, and 1969).

Bowlby's phases correspond in several ways to stages in babies' play described by two later researchers, Belsky and Most (1982). At first a baby plays in a completely undifferentiated way, manipulating and mouthing objects more or less at random. You could phrase this stage as, "The object is what I do." Then an infant begins to tailor its own procedures to fit the object, fingering and mouthing and looking at it according to what fits a mobile or a rattle or a box. "What is this? And what can it do?" Eventually, children begin to draw conceptual relationships between objects, and they start to use their own previous experience with mobile or rattle. They assert control of the relationship between the object and themselves. "What can I do with this object?" At about a year, the child gets beyond the physical limitations of the object--or the self. He begins to be able to do pretend play, to use a seashell as a cup or to mimic driving a car. "What can I make this subject or object into?"

In effect, the baby-watchers are demonstrating some of the basic assumptions of psychoanalysis. Their work asks for a psychoanalytic response.

One, a child develops in a progress (which is probably genetically programmed) from earlier and more primitive abilities to later and more complex skills. Such a program fits the psychoanalytic notion of developmental phases or stages. It is not consistent with the romantic idea of childhood that we began life in some unrepressed, utopian state of mind that later succumbed to repression and other civilizing ills. Rather, the newborn, as compared to the child of three, is not so much free as limited. The loss of infancy is growth.

Two, we did not, like Topsy, just grow. There is a logic to child development. We do not lurch abruptly from one stage to another, unrelated stage. Rather, an earlier stage transforms into the next in ways that we can understand commonsensically. A child develops in a continuous, sensible way.

Three, from the moment of birth (and perhaps before), a child is engaged in a feedback or dialectic with his environment, particularly the persons who surround him. They act on him, his response affects their subsequent[185] actions, and that response to him enters in turn into his next action.

Four, in this feedback, what a baby feels emotionally and what a baby knows cognitively intertwine. One cannot separate a baby's affective development from his developing perceptual and cognitive skills. Each aids or interferes with the other.

No doubt we could glean other psychoanalytic fundamentals from this, to me, extraordinarily exciting line of psychological research, but we also need to recognize that the psychoanalysts and the observers and experimenters are coming at childhood in rather different ways. One could trace all of the above principles in Freud's account of childhood, not, to be sure, always fully explored. Freud's (and later psychoanalysts') accounts come almost entirely from observing this particular adult or that particular child, a clinician's concern. The baby-watchers, by contrast, concern themselves with categories, a certain kind of stimulus, a certain kind of gazing, a certain kind of play.

One experimenter, Michael Lewis, has addressed this difference by distinguishing two aspects of the self. One is categorical, the self I intend when I say, "I am male" or "I am big" or "I am writing a book." The other is existential, a more basic self, the "I" who inhabits all those sentences, whom I have known from the first moments of my existence as the self who opens my eyes or feels pain. Clearly, the existential self comes into being before the other, yet the existential self, starting at a very early age, is constantly discovering and defining itself as being like or unlike this or that category (Lewis and Brooks-Gunn, 1982). Categorical and existential selves exist in a dialectic relationship.

Characteristically, I would translate Lewis's dialectic into observables. The categories are what the observers and experimenters provide, and indeed what I provide myself when I look at myself "objectively," "out there," as an object, an other. I would translate the existential self into what an observer would see as the individual self, a unique being with a unique history which one senses as a personal style. Just as, when I write, I use categories, nouns and verbs, but choose and combine them in my individual way, so the baby uses categories, significant persons and stimuli, but chooses and combines them in an increasingly individual way. One could model a baby like a sentence, as drawing on socially and biologically given categories but using them with a certain personal style. That model brings us back, in effect, to earlier ones: identity governing a hierarchy of feedbacks or an identity hearing the questions all humans share but hearing them and answering in a personal idiom.

We can put the new knowledge about early infancy together with identity theory and feedback to explore the ways heredity and environment, nature[186] and nurture, learning and faculties, or instinctual drives and object relations interact to form an I. We can use identity theory to imagine a moment by moment dialogue that will model the way we learn to see, hear, know, or remember reality. We begin with a paradox, namely,

The Preverbal Dialogue

Until now, I have been describing the baby's developmental dialogue as calls from his community and family. These relations of the baby to the people and things that environ him are "there," in the sense that you can even videotape them, and see how they call to him. Less obviously "there," but a balance of evidence from experimental studies confirms them, are the zones and drives that Freud and other early psychoanalysts, notably Karl Abraham, posited (Fisher and Greenberg, 1977, pp. 131-37 and 163-66). These sound the calls from his own body.

Early psychoanalytic theory said that, as the baby grows, different areas of his body become the focus of psychological concern and excitability of the nerves. For the first year of life, the inside and outside of the mouth become the focal zone, with eyes and skin taking on a related importance. Later the key zone will be the anus, and later still the genitals.

As each of these zones becomes focal, it provides a mode of behavior, taking in through the mouth, for example, or expelling from the anus. The zone also provides a focus for the significant people in the baby's environment, leading (in Erikson's phrase) to "decisive encounters." In the dialogue I am proposing as a model, these body zones provide a major part of the language in which the family and the community speak to a baby and a major part of the vocabulary he builds to respond.

In the earliest period of infancy, the baby lives through its mouth. He relates to the world by incorporation in its most literal sense, taking it into his body. Mostly he sucks in milk but he also takes in sights through his eyes and feelings of warmth and cuddling through his skin. We can understand this taking in as one side of a developmental dialogue. Family and society are saying to the baby, This is how we give. Some societies offer plenty, others famine. Some cultures swaddle, others encourage movement of arms and legs. In my own childhood a rigid schedule of feeding was the norm. In my children's childhood, we fed on demand. In the largest sense, however, all cultures, in giving, pose the same question: How will you receive what we give? And a baby answers in "personally and culturally significant ways" (again, Erikson's phrase), and so grows. The I comes into being through otherness--a profoundly paradoxical twist to our ideas of human nature, a decentering.[187]

Lacan uses the word "alienation" for this state of affairs, giving it a negative tone, but one could equally well state it positively through a word like "community," as, say, Erikson does: the I can only come into being through a community of I's. The essential idea, however, is the same: self comes into being through another person's experience of that self. The mother gives back to the baby her version of the smiles and gurgles and cries the baby has given to her. Further, she perceives the baby more integratedly than the baby can perceive itself. Hence the other reflects a more integrated, a superior, so to speak, self back to the originating I, which takes it in and uses it to model a possible future I and to elicit other reflectings and hence further growth of the I. Generally this feedback is good, but it can be destructive. Jenny's mother was telling Jenny, you are not responsive enough for me, and Jenny gave back in her mother's scheme of things precisely what her mother reflected, a nonresponsive baby, and this bad feedback threatened her very sanity.

Within this dialogue of giving and receiving early psychoanalysts distinguished an earlier and a later mode. In the first (say) four weeks of life the baby mostly receives passively, sending out massive signals of total body pleasure or pain as a response. Gradually, however, he begins to take a more active role in shaping his environment. He not only sucks but clamps his gums onto the nipple. His brain learns to single out the human face from the stream of sights that passes before his unskilled eyes. His fingers clasp particular objects. He begins to take as well as to receive. Soon, with this new activity (as opposed to passivity) comes the pain of teething and the pleasure of biting. He feels angry because his mouth, hitherto the focus of pleasure, has become the focus of pain. Associating the change with mother, he bites her and perhaps she in response retaliates for being bitten, the first of many situations "in which the intensity of the impulse leads to its own defeat" (Erikson, 1963, p. 79). In effect, the baby's body and family are asking him, How will you take?, in a double sense. How will you actively take instead of passively being given to?, but also, How will you "take it?"

The mutuality of mother and baby can and almost always does sustain them through this confrontation and reversal. To the extent it does, Erikson theorizes, the baby builds the first layer of a basic sense of trust that will provide the base for a sense of hope and confidence throughout life. To the extent the mutuality of mother and infant does not overcome the baby's frustration, the baby develops a sense of doom, failure, and loss. In extreme cases, the baby can become psychotic, but most of us simply develop a trust that outweighs the sense of distrust. Always, however, we have both, as Iiro combined a sense that he was loved with a feeling he was loved on condition he get caught up in his mother's obsession to correct his fingers and toes.[188]

My account of babyhood thus far follows Karl Abraham's early and Erik Erikson's later descriptions of "orality," based primarily on Freud's positing of drives associated with particular zones. This early idea of orality rested mostly on adult character structures explored in the therapy of adults. Another way of exploring the first, wordless year of life would be to look back at the zero year old from the perspective of a one-year-old and account for some of the things he has become able to do.

He can be "alone together" (in Winnicott's phrase) with his mother, he playing by himself, she doing something of her own, yet each aware of the other. He can love a blanket or teddy bear and use it as a source of solace. He can let another take care of him while his mother goes out, knowing that it is another and accepting the stand-in. He can walk or crawl into another room out of his mother's sight and stay there, returning when he wishes.[189]

To do just these simple things, a baby has had to achieve ever more and more sophisticated answers to a constantly growing array of questions, answers far beyond those he was born with. To be "alone together" asks that the child accept the separateness of his mother and himself. Now he can "be held" in a symbolic as well as a literal way. To love a teddy or a blanket as "security cloth," he has learned to adapt pieces of the world outside himself to his own needs, another relation to otherness. To accept a babysitter, he has learned to distinguish different persons in the stream of people who attend to his needs, to accept them as persons, and to trust that the one person who matters most to him will return even if he accepts a temporary substitute. Simply to crawl into another room involves a willingness to be separate from that primary caregiver and a trusting belief that the union can be reestablished at will, either by physical crawling or by crying out. It implies also an ability to wait the necessary time to be reunited, to "tolerate delay."

Infants are unspeaking, and in imagining what goes on in the mind of a child who can't say, one must infer. I have been using two inferences widely accepted by psychoanalytic observers of very young children. The first is that the newborn baby does not recognize otherness as otherness. I do not mean to rule out some degree of sophistication in the newborn about what he sees and hears. The baby may be able in a purely perceptual way to grasp the position of an object in space or relate the occurrence of a certain voice to a certain face, but he does not see these things as discontinuous with himself--as "other." Everything is referred to inner comfort or discomfort. When he does begin to know otherness (around the eighth month of life), he senses it as a rude awakening from a world previously felt as lovingly, embracingly centered on himself, intensely and quickly responsive to his wishes.

The second inference is that at some time during the first year or year and a half the child accepts that otherness. Not permanently, not irrevocably--but he becomes able to make the distinction between self and other, to hold it, or to give it up, more or less at will. The psychoanalyst speaks of the baby's achieving "object constancy" but means by that term something different from the psychologist who also uses it.

Most psychologists mean by "object constancy" your ability to perceive, say, a postage stamp as such. You see it from many different distances or points of view, at different angles and under different lighting. You may never see it as a rectangle of a certain size and color, yet you "know" it is a pink oblong and, moreover, the same pink oblong although its image on your retina keeps changing. You have the ability to make a concept of the object and hold that constant even though your perceptions of the object vary widely. Certainly this is essential to what Mahler and other psychoanalysts call "object constancy," but it is not all of it.

Piaget speaks of "object constancy" as the ability to keep track of a ball when it rolls behind the sofa, to know where it is and to imagine it, even though it is out of sight. This, too, is part of what a child needs in order to achieve psychoanalytic "object constancy," but only part.

For the psychoanalyst, "object" means an emotional object like a mother or a teddy bear. Selma Fraiberg, in an inspired guess, formulated the difference between psychoanalytic object constancy and Piaget's by watching her dog, Brandy. Brandy learned early to recognize the can of dog food when it appeared: "recognition memory." Babies quickly do the same with breast or bottle. Brandy also learned to recall the can of dog food when he was hungry and it had not appeared. He would stand in front of the refrigerator and scratch and plead. This Fraiberg called "evocation memory": recalling the object when it is wanted but absent. But Brandy never gave a sign of imagining the can of dog food simply at will (1969).

That is the human thing. That is the imagining that babies achieve. Having this ability, a baby can imagine his mother apart from his love of (or anger at) her. He can begin to feel her as really a part of himself--internalized. Simultaneously, he can begin to think of her as wholly separate from himself, a whole other being, not just a source of satisfactions. Further, he has shown that he can turn passive into active, memory prompted by need into memory he himself initiates.

A mother is likely to see this rather abstract achievement as the baby's calm at her absence. Erikson's term for it is "basic trust," "the basic faith in existence," the sense "not only that one has learned to rely on the sameness and continuity of the outer providers, but also that one may trust oneself and the capacity of one's own organs to cope with urges; and that one is able to[190] consider oneself trustworthy enough so that the providers will not need to be on guard lest they be nipped" (1963, pp. 248, 252).

As Erikson makes clear, the baby's growing sense of constancy and trust embraces not only the outer world, but the inner. Object constancy implies self constancy. That is, feeling that another is trustworthy makes it possible, indeed requires, that one know that the other is in fact other. This knowledge, this "self-object differentiation," is probably the key achievement of the first stage of development because it marks the child's entry into the specifically human world of symbols.

To imagine itself, its own body, or to imagine another person--these abilities mean that the infant has to use a symbol. Symbolization grows in an atmosphere of trustful sharing of contemplated objects. For a baby, symbols and the ability to symbolize are what he and his mother have shared. Conversely, if the infant's relationship with his mother is seriously disturbed, symbolization will very likely miscarry as well (Werner and Kaplan, 1963, pp. 73, 79, 83).

We can only infer a baby's state of mind, but theory suggests that the child can put relatively neutral objects into symbols before being able to symbolize itself or its mother. A rattle or a block bears very little of the mingling of frustration and desire that the baby brings to that all-powerful other who satisfies his needs. Sometimes she satisfies quickly and rightly. Sometimes she cannot figure out what it is he wants, and then he can feel overwhelmed by need. He can dissolve into paroxysms of angry frustration. Inevitably, then, toward the caregiver, the baby feels that mingling of love and hate for which Freud coined the term "ambivalence." For the baby (as for an adult) ambivalence must make it difficult to single out an other as a defined concept.

The very nature of infancy poses the baby the question, "How will you deal with your ambivalence?" Classical theory, beginning with Freud, holds that the baby copes by imagining his caregiver in two parts, a bad part outside him and a good part inside him. One of the tasks of the first year is to put those parts back together into a whole person. If a baby can imagine his mother as a single person, he has brought his ambivalence within manageable bounds. He has found a neutral space free of his own passionate love and hate in which she can simply be or in which they can be "alone together."

To bring his love and hate within bounds implies that over a period of time he has learned to wait to be fed, to have the room made warm, or to have the light turned off, without being overwhelmed by need. He has learned, in the psychoanalysts' phrase, to tolerate delay, because he has been able, from time to time, to have the experience of endurable and successful waiting. He has had what Winnicott called "good enough" mothering. He has been[191] hungry and has had to wait to be fed, but was fed before he was overwhelmed by desire. His body was warmed--not before he could know it needed to be, but before he had been swamped by the agony of waiting. The light was turned off, not before it had begun to bother him, but after he had become tetchy and irritated without being able to communicate why.

Key to this toleration of delay is hope and trust in another being. René Spitz concluded from his studies of babies separated from their parents during World War II that there must be one primary person toward whom the infant can form a relation, no matter how many others assist in his care (1965). Recently, in the interests of freeing women from the tyranny of Kinder, Küche, Kirche, some researchers have challenged Spitz's conclusion that the baby needs some one person to relate to. One researcher, for example, finds "nothing to suggest that mothering cannot be shared by several people." Chodorow and others point out, however, that the psychoanalytic point of view does not advocate exclusive mothering, only that there be one person with whom the child can form an affective bond (1978, pp. 74-75 and references there cited). Out of that bond comes the child's ability to wait, to symbolize, to tolerate delay, to achieve object constancy, and all the rest.

These abilities we have inferred by looking back from the one- year-old to the zero-year-old. Another source of evidence, obviously, would be to watch actual babies. Two important psychoanalytic groups have done so: René Spitz's, starting in the 1930s, and Margaret Mahler's, beginning in the 1950s. The psychoanalytic baby-watchers divide this first major stage of the I's becoming, that is, the baby's first year or two or three, into six phases, with one important division taking place around the fourth or fifth month. The division into stages before then has to rest largely on inference from the analysis of adult and child psychotics with disorders stemming from that early period. After four or five months, however, one can learn much more by directly watching babies.

There is, of course, plenty to watch in the first few weeks, but it is difficult to interpret, as every caregiver knows who has tried to relieve a newborn's massive but unnamable distress. In our society, the baby and mother come home from the hospital a few days after birth. The hospital has often separated mother and baby so that it is only when they get home after some days' delay that they begin the intense process of fitting their rhythms together. These negotiations take place in the language of feeding. The baby demands food peremptorily in response to overwhelming need. The mother responds in adult time, perhaps nudging the baby toward a three- or four-hour schedule (Sander, 1969).

A problem for this negotiation is the undifferentiated quality of the infant's inner life--at least as we guess at it. He and his mother relate as[192] needer and satisfier, and he feels that relation as all or nothing. He is either needing and crying or not needing and content. Researchers describe him as a purely biological organism, his responses as "reflex" or "thalamic." Spitz calls his sensing of the world "coenesthetic reception," in which all the senses overlap; he contrasts it to perception proper (1965, p. 134).

In that single-mindedness one percept stands out, the human face. From the earliest feedings, a baby has looked into his mother's eyes as part of his total gratification: the satisfaction of mouth, skin, stomach, and eye, her face marking the presence of his need gratifier. Around the fourth week of life, a baby begins to single out her face from its surroundings, seeking it with his gaze. This happens so early that it may even be biologically programmed (Spitz, 1965, pp. 81, 86).

In thus singling out a face, the baby is making a momentous reply, but what has the world around the infant asked, and how can we understand the unworded answer? In our society, perhaps in every society, the all or nothing needs of the baby have to be matched to the family and household around him, to brothers' and sisters' play, a father or mother's work, to all the family's concerns and wishes. Most important, the people around him want the baby to respond to them, to their need to evoke a human response in another. This need is scarcely a question that adults could phrase. It is more like a call of nature, a beckoning that has to be interpreted. I think we can say that gesturing to the baby means, Fit! Join! Become part of our human group.

What the baby hears or how he interprets it, I can imagine only by reading back from his response. By singling out a face, he says, in effect, I can "be toward" someone. I can come out of this world I have, in which I am totally self-absorbed and omnipotent, in which I am the world. I can "be toward" something or somebody--that face which is a sign for ecstatic contentment. If the baby has answered, I can be toward, then the first form of that call from mother, family, and community must have been, Be toward me, and the baby's being toward a face accepted that relationship. Conversely, as Selma Fraiberg has shown, blind children who cannot return gaze for gaze risk autism or psychosis, the catastrophic failure of that first mutuality, unless one can train their parents to recognize other signs of "being toward" (1977).

To answer, Yes, I can "be toward" implies another answer as well. It says a baby has mastered another fundamental ability, which underlies many others and which, in the context of his family's need that he join, is completely paradoxical. He shows that he can single out a physical object in space. He can disjoin. He can give a person an edge. He can separate a presence in time, giving an event a beginning, middle, and end. This bounding is nothing definite or willed, just a "toward," but it is a beginning.[193]

Around the third month of life, Spitz reports, a baby makes another response to that insistent call from his community. He smiles, not the haphazard gurgling sort of glee he may have shown before, but in response to a specific stimulus: any human face. Curiously, a baby responds to the combination of two eyes and a nose in motion, even if the "face" is a Halloween mask. A baby will not smile at a profile and, presented with a side view of a face, may even stare perplexedly at the ear as if to wonder where the other eye went. In other words, the child is not responding to his mother or any particular person. He is greeting a sign (or gestalt) of need gratification, and he will smile at any face, real or drawn, white or black, known or unknown. Spitz calls it a "pre-object." Nevertheless, this action, too, is momentous as a reply in the developmental dialogue. Not only can the baby single out this sign from the stream of sensations, he can smile at it.

In effect, by "smiling toward," a baby shows that he has discov- ered that he has a partner in the dyad of baby and adult. Further, he has actively used what Spitz calls his "snout," that is, the configuration of lips, chin, nose, and cheek. Up till now this snout had been primarily his way of taking in the world passively, either as satisfaction or as perception. He now has made this "snout" into something that puts out as well as takes in, expressing as well as absorbing. He has turned passivity into activity (Spitz, 1965, p. 107).

Until this time the baby had been a passive receiver of nurture. When he becomes able to smile at a human face, he has given a first answer to the communal call for him to join the human race, to turn from being wholly passive to being active (Spitz, 1965, pp. 52-85).

He thus shows, in psychoanalytic terms, a rudimentary ego. That is, he demonstrates the beginnings of two abilities that will someday underlie all his adaptations to reality. First, he can bound something. Second, he can reverse direction from passive to active, from coming in to going out. Mahler speaks of two intertwined developmental tracks of separation and individuation. Separation is the move toward distancing, differentiating, distinguishing. Individuation is the move toward personal autonomy: perception, seeing, hearing, remembering, knowing, or testing for oneself (Mahler et al., 1975, pp. 39-41).

The baby who is able to "smile toward" has passed through only two "pre-object" stages, however. Mahler sees four more stages in separation proper before the infant achieves true object constancy: first, differentiation, from 4-5 months to walking; second, practicing, from walking to 15-24 months; third, rapprochement, from 15-24 months to the middle of the second year (but with great variability); fourth, the consolidation of individuality and the beginnings of object constancy, a developmental period that in Mahler's experience does not begin before the third year and then continues all through life. Throughout, the community around an infant is[194] asking him to join, not mindlessly or conformingly (although sometimes that way, too), but as an individual who thinks, feels, and acts on his own and in relation to others (ibid.)

A baby changes from indiscriminate smiling to a smile reserved for one special caregiver, mother. That smile signals a transition. It is the "first organizer" (in Spitz's term) and marks the transition passage from the "pre-object" stages toward Mahler's first stage in separation proper: differentiation. In the pre-object stages a baby molded and nestled into his mother's arms. Now we see him pushing away from his mother's body. She holds his arms and he uses the newfound strength in his legs to push against her stomach, almost standing, so that he gets a better look at her. "Stemming" the baby-watchers call it.

Erect this way, he can turn his head to scan his surroundings. The baby pulls at his mother's hair. He pokes into her ears or nose. He may put food into her mouth. He may become fascinated by a brooch or necklace or eyeglasses. Having discovered an other, he now explores and bounds her (Mahler et al., 1975, pp. 52-55).

This exploration peaks at six or seven months and then shades into what Mahler calls "checking back." A baby continues to learn about mother, her look, her feel, her texture, her sound, her smell, and her taste, but he begins to compare her with not-mother, to other sights, sounds, smells, and textures. In exploring eyeglasses, hair, or bracelet, he finds out what belongs and does not belong to mother's body. He sharpens the discrimination signaled by the special smile he gives mother and not not-mother (Mahler et al., 1975, pp. 55-58).[195]

Spitz coined two terms for the kinds of perception going on. The earlier, in which the baby focuses inwardly onto the state of his own well-being and perceives events globally as pleasing or displeasing, satisfying or frustrating, he called "coenesthetic." The word literally means that the different senses all act together as one sense, leading to a feeling of total pleasure or displeasure. The perceptions that develop in true separating he called "diacritic," literally separated judgments, in which the eye sees and the ear hears and a baby discriminates between sight and sound (1965, p. 44).

These heightened perceptions and distinctions lead to the familiar "stranger reaction" around the eighth month. Some babies are frightened of strangers. They cry and strain toward their mothers. Other babies explore. They check out a stranger's finger, clothing, pen, or necklace. They may even run their hand over her face or hair. Having made this "customs inspection" (as the baby-watchers call it), a baby relaxes into his mother's arms, and his face and eyes tell of the joy of reunion. In other words, a baby does not just turn away from the stranger; he turns away toward someone (Mahler et al., 1975, pp. 56-58).

This is the time when the baby begins to be able to play the familiar games of childhood. At three months, like Jenny subjected to her mother's relentless stimulation, a baby is relatively powerless. So is a five-month-old. As Louise Kaplan describes him, when he sees his mother disappear through a doorway, he can't do much about it, but, if he has come to feel confidence in the sound of her footsteps or a typewriter or water running, he does not panic.

One sign of that confidence is his ability to enjoy her games of peekaboo. She hides her face and when his worry reaches just enough of a tension, out she pops again. That was at five months or so. Around ten months, the baby can play his own peekaboo. How does mother react to his disappearance when he puts a blanket over his head or when he sticks his face down into his mattress? Then she hides her head and he looks worried until she reappears and he can crow with triumph just as she did. The game satisfies many needs. Perhaps that is why it is played all over the world (Kaplan, 1978, pp. 143-47).

The most famous game in the literature of baby-watching, the one that Freud watched his small grandchild Ernst playing, also satisfied the need to master parental disappearance. At one and a half, little Ernst would throw toys out of his bed, crying as he did so a long, drawn-out "o-o-o-o-o." Freud and the boy's mother agreed this was the German word fort, "gone." One day the child was playing with a spool with a string tied round it. From the floor, he threw the spool over the edge of his crib so that it disappeared and he said "o-o-o-o-o." But then Ernst used the string to pull the spool into his crib again and cried da, "there!" Freud's interpretation of this fort-da game (as it has come to be called) is much more tentative than those theorists who have erected virtual systems of metaphysics on it. Freud reads it as like peekaboo, a way of demonstrating that what disappears returns. It was a way of mirroring a situation he had suffered passively, his mother's going out, by one he actively created for himself. In other games, he played at making himself disappear from a mirror and his father disappear at "the front." In all these situations he was using objects (almost as an adult would use an artistic medium) to re-create an intensely personal situation involving his own relation with his mother (1920g, 18:14-16; see also Kaplan, 1978, pp. 151-52).

Once a baby learns to crawl, he can play catch-me. The baby scrambles off with his mother in hot pursuit, but she just barely can't catch him! He stays out of her reach until he tires and lets the menacing pursuer of babies catch him--to his great joy. Here again, the baby has made active what he experienced only passively, being caught up by his mother. He mirrors something she did, thereby turning into active play the perhaps fright-[196]ening reality of her great power and his helplessness. Again, he proves in a cognitive sense that what disappears comes back (Kaplan, 1978, pp. 147-151).

Obviously, a baby cannot play catch-me until he can crawl. This game and the others depend on the particular infant's physical abilities and coordination, and at any given age, say ten months, these will vary widely. So too will the baby's temperament and his mother's. These games, like everything else the mother and child do together, are played in a vocabulary unique to each mother and child, although the developmental tasks they involve and the abilities they require are common to all children--and mothers. Their dialogue takes place in a universal physiological language, a cultural dialect, and a unique and individual style.

What happens in that conversation is that the child is evolving a variety of answers to the persistent call of his family and community to join them. His earliest response was to "be toward." As he begins more and more to separate the continuum that first surrounded him and to individuate himself, he can answer more complexly: can be apart-from-toward. Can be toward but can also wish to be "apart from." Can move from the one wish to the other. "Can be"--where once he was only passive and receptive, now he can choose and act. Not quite an I yet.

"Hatching" is Mahler's term for the infant's first pulling away from the orbit in which he and his mother formed a union of two people wholly focused on each other, a dyad. "Practising" is her term for the second stage, in which a baby uses physical separations to prepare for the far more important psychological separation that is to follow. Thus, a baby progresses from the pattern of checking back, playing or crawling close to his mother, to his first unaided steps away from her, taking off on one's own.

What sets this second stage apart from the first is the baby's increasing ability with his legs and arms as he progresses from crawling to unaided walking. During the first part of this transition, the baby sits up, crawls, paddles, creeps, rights himself, and sometimes clambers up to a standing position by holding onto the coffee table. In the second part, he stands unaided and begins free walking. Interestingly, according to Mahler's observations, the baby usually takes his first unaided steps away from his mother (not as in folklore and poetry, toward her--Mahler et al., 1975, pp. 65-76).

It is impossible to overstate the symbolic meaning of being upright. Each baby lives again the exhilaration our hominid ancestors must have felt when they stood up and looked far across the African savannas and realized that they alone surveyed all that land. Other creatures became beneath and lesser. Imagine the feeling of first being able to turn the muscles in your neck and back to deliberately locate what you want, to look down on obstacles[197] and objects that once you had to eye on their own level, to take a grand survey of your environment.

Many of our words and metaphors reflect this pride in standing. "Survey" itself, for example, means to oversee or see over. Moral terms like "erect," "upright," or "upstanding" gain force from our childhood achievement of verticality, just as words like "grovel," "cower," "squat," "crawl," and "creep" take on moral connotations of an infant's powerlessness.

This second stage is a transition from a "fall" to a "rise." To a baby, standing and walking mean a vastly increased scope for all the skills he was born with but has yet to perfect: seeing distances and dimensions, turning his head, locating objects by sound, understanding relations of higher and lower, left and right, in front of, behind, above, beneath. To be sure, at this stage the baby will do all these things close to mother's knee but he will do them. He can exult to himself, I am upright the way they are. He meets his mother now when he is erect, a new kind of face to face closeness in which he is much more of an equal partner. Moreover, his new powers allow him to come to mother, not just she to him. He thus strengthens his bond to her, at the same time that he makes it a matter of his own choice and will. Jason's sense of omnipotence was thus right for his age, although his depressed mother did not answer him with realistic responses to dangers. The more usual outcome is a negotiated balance between the omnipotence of the child and the caution of the adult (Mahler et al., 1975, pp. 70-75).

This new position of control and will implies a loss of something else, the snuggly, cuddly world of a few months before. To make the most of what his legs can now do, the child needs to take the security of that world with him as he walks. He needs to get it inside himself, as his own confidence and trust and perhaps in a more tangible form as well. Hence the importance of

Teddy Bears

In the first months of life, a baby finds in his fingers, thumbs, and fist a way of easing the discomforts his psyche feels. In his mouth, they simulate the comfort of the breast. By holding a hand to his cheek he can imitate the feel of breast against cheek and hand against clutching breast. From fingers, fist, and especially thumb, a baby moves on to dolls and other toys, without, however, giving up the sensuous comforts of his hand. He finds what the English have happily called "soft toys," the teddy bear, the floppy dog, or the lopeared bunny, or he can seize on, in the American phrase, a "security cloth."

The thumb was only one step away from the breast, a sign accompanying rather than a symbol standing for pleasure in the mouth. The teddy or the blanket, however, serves as a reminder of the feel and warmth and smell that[198] accompanied mothering. It is a sign of a sign, so to speak. Two steps away from the actual gratification, the teddy or blanket is a true symbol, for it has an arbitrary connection to the mothering for which it stands: there is no reason inherent in this blanket why it can give the baby a feeling of security while some other blanket cannot. Yet, of course, there is, for this symbol is only partly created by the baby. Partly the teddy or blanket has a history as well as a good smell and a warm, worn feel that derive from that history. Partly it is, in Winnicott's term, "found" (and for me the word has the sudden, joyful feeling of "The lost is found!").

Hence the teddy bear is both a symbol and a sign and even, to some extent, the thing itself--mothering--embodied in a set of sensations as well as an object. Winnicott coined the term for this special entity: a "transitional object." It is transitional between sign and symbol. It is a created object standing for something else, hence a symbol. It is also a found object that either is or is a sign of the presence of that something else (mothering) and of the desires mothering satisfies. Also, to the extent that it is a sign or symbol of mothering, not mothering itself, it is a sign of the absence of mothering as well. The teddy bear embodies the transition between the presence and the absence of mother (Winnicott, 1971a, particularly chap. 1).

It can also be transitional between self and the world of not self, between inside and outside, between the child's inner memories of merger and the outer world, unmerged. Most of all, the teddy bear stands for oneness, the earlier relation when the baby and his world were perfect and, as Louise Kaplan phrases it, "differences between inside and outside and between me and not-me did not exist."

As the baby presses the security blanket to his cheeks and nose it caresses him. It smells of the sweetness of a yes-saying mother and also of smells that belong to the baby. The blanket's molding softness is like the time when he and mother were one. The blanket exists "out there" in the inanimate world of rattles, bottles, pillows and mobiles. Yet it is alive with reminiscences of human dialogue. Furthermore, the baby can scratch, pinch, rub and slap his blanket around without a no or a don't or any possibility of real destruction. The blanket withstands the baby's passionate excitements and it never lets him down. It's always there when he longs for it (Kaplan, 1978, pp. 154-55).

The soft toy thus can stand for the mother in a mystical oneness between baby and mother, a creature who, in a way, never existed, yet was imagined and needs to be imagined again and again, now especially when the baby is venturing out on hands and knees or upright into new and wonderful spaces which are, nevertheless, challenging, hard, even dangerous and frightening. Sometimes there will be strain and frustration. Sometimes outer reality will[199] be harshly unresponsive to inner desires. Then the baby--and even the adult--will try to bring back the illusion of a union that includes otherness. A security cloth, a soft toy, a hum, a stroking gesture, or a rocking motion can bring it back for the infant. A poem or a special memento can bring it back for the adult (Kaplan, 1978, p. 156. For the artistic implications of a baby's objects, see Milner, 1957b).

Looking back at the birth of an I, we can see the establishment of five intertwined themes or problems that make up the I which the child will bring to new situations (see the chart on pp. 244-45). First, the child must have learned to tolerate delay and hence must have begun a sense of time. Second, out of the ability to wait comes the ability to imagine and to symbolize what is being waited for. Third, by waiting the child also makes a sign that it has distinguished an external other separate from its own inner states. The baby has made its first moves toward control of the boundary between inside and outside. To recognize an outside is the first step in acting on it, while accepting an inside as such provides the basis for passivity (as Dr. Vincent had to do when brainwashed). Hence the baby has also taken a fourth step, distinguishing activity from passivity. Fifth, by imagining the other as other, the child necessarily learns there is a not-other, an I. He has opened the door to all the distinctively human things that follow from that I's knowing it is an I.

We begin to see the adult human's ability to DEFT take form, still in what Piaget would call the "sensorimotor stage." The baby acts out in literal, physical ways ideas that tax the metaphors and metaphysics of adults.

How will you separate and re-relate self and object?
By endowing the admittedly not-me with my inner wishes and fears--as I do this blanket (F).

How will you bound inside and outside?
As by holding this blanket, I hold onto what I have projected from inside, even by acknowledging it is now outside (D).

How will you symbolize?
By means of external, 'found' objects which themselves have and which I imbue with symbolic value (D).

How will you accept delay by yourself and by others?
By displacing my attention to symbolized and imaginatively endowed objects (like this[200] blanket), to which time is irrelevant (T).

How will you tolerate loving and hating the same person?
By displacing my love and hate onto other, less vital objects, like this blanket (D), and by trusting that my love and hate will no more destroy them than they destroy this blanket (E).

Even with a teddy bear, a baby does not learn these things irrevocably, of course. As an adult, how well do I tolerate delay in love or recognition? Am I able to see those I love as wholes, faults and all? Do I see myself uncolored by my own wishes or fears? Can I always keep a sharp boundary between what I think and what the rest of the world thinks? Does any of us?

It is probably with the baby as with the adult. The I wins these abilities at first for a brief moment or two, then for longer periods, as favorable experience accumulates, but never without the possibility of lapsing back toward an undifferentiated, unsymbolizing self. In the 1950s when these ideas were beginning to circulate, psychoanalysts tended to think of a crucial moment of "self-object differentiation." To be sure, there must be one moment when, for the first time, the baby imagines an other and a self, but it seems easier to think of this ability as also a relative thing, coming into being over a long relationship of dialogue between caregiver and care receiver.

We can tease out, then, five strands of achievement in that first year of becoming I, five experiences the child must have had in order to do things like crawl out of sight of its mother, call her or itself by name, or be "alone together" with her. The child must have tolerated delay, mastered ambivalence, distinguished self from other and activity from passivity, and symbolized those distinctions. No doubt there are other ways of thinking about the achievements of the first year, but these will serve to outline the origins of an I.

Also, they correspond (not entirely by coincidence) to four fundamental capabilities of an ego, as defined in second phase psychoanalysis, that is, ego psychology. An ego, to deal with the demands of inner and outer reality, uses four modes of displacement. The baby achieves object constancy when he has acquired corresponding abilities (Holland, 1973a).

The ego displaces	The baby begins to
in direction.	separate inside from outside
in time.	tolerate delay.
in number.	distinguish self from other
through similarity.	symbolize.

Most important, a baby makes these achievements in and through a special emotional climate. At first there was only pleasure and unpleasure. As the baby came to know the nurturing other, he split positive and negative into good inner and bad outer or into good and bad other(s). Full acceptance of an other, though, means acceptance of both the satisfactions and the frustrations she brings. A baby has to master the intense ambivalence its helpless situation engenders. Only then can an infant form an ego (with these basic abilities for starters) in and through a basic trust that satisfaction[201] will come despite the anger and despite the fear of being overwhelmed with need. Once these five themes or issues are sounded in the developmental dialogue the baby is ready to proceed to the next stage.

Of course, one stage does not suddenly leave off and the next begin. Stages may be completed, may overlap, be separated or linked, and the problems posed by one may be heard in the language of another. Indeed, one of the important ways to account for the tremendous variety in human development and personality despite a relatively small number of stages, three or four or five, is precisely this possibility of almost infinite variability.

Differentiation, discrimination, distinction--development proceeds by a kind of parting or separation, Juliet's "sweet sorrow." "Individuation," writes Hans Loewald, "comes about by the losses of separation" (1978, p. 46). He is stating one meaning of what is often called Freud's tragic sense. To become an active little toddler, the baby gives up the ease and passivity of the cradle. To become a speaking baby, he gives up the undifferentiated gurgle and goo. To become a baby at all we gave up the blissful union of the womb.

Not entirely, however. We give them up but partially, hesitantly, and never irrecoverably. When we suffer a loss, we mourn. That is, we incorporate what is lost "out there" as part of the "in here" which is our continuing mental processes. We carry these earlier states with us, and we come back to them as we give ourselves moments of extreme passivity or ecstasy. We return like travelers to that most ancient, Mycenaean self that existed in a prehistory before other had become other.[202]

9  /  Zones and Modes

In the classical psychoanalytic picture, throughout the birth of an I, the mouth was the baby's main window on the world. Once the baby acquired new capacities for relationships with things and people, other body zones became important. In particular, much of his mental and nervous energy became focused on the process and product of squeezing wastes out of his body.

Freud believed that different zones of an infant's body became focal because of purely biolo