Early Organization of the Psyche, Demos (1992)
The Early Organization of the Psyche
Traditional Psychoanalytic Understanding
Noy (1969) described the neonate as follows: “In the first weeks of life, the infant shifts between states of sleep and states of tension. Any need (hunger, thirst, cold, etc.) will awaken the infant from his sleep when the tension has mounted to a sufficient degree. This tension is expressed in various somatic ways, such as crying and arms and leg movements. When the specific need is satisfied, the tension is reduced and the infant falls asleep again. In this stage, consciousness is equal to tension, and the only affective qualities that we may assume to exist are pain and pleasure.” These “experiences of tension and pain are overwhelming and urgent,” and “the infant is completely dependent on the caregiver for relief.”
Similarly, writers like Mahler and Winnicott “described early experience as being directed inward, unintegrated, and alternating between overwhelmingly urgent instinctual tension and relief or quiescence without any control or knowledge of how or why these alterations occur. Both speak of the absolute dependency of the young infant on the caregiver and of the infant’s possessing no means of knowing anything about the caregiver.”
Infant Research
Infant Affective Capacities. Infant research suggests that infants are born “capable of experiencing the distinctive quality of each innate affect, in a range of intensities.” This conclusion is based primarily on the writings and research of Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman.
Tomkins wrote that an affect is an innate, automatic physiological response to a stimulus. Each affect produces a specific set of physiological responses. The function of these responses is to create in us a rewarding or punishing state and in so doing to motivate us to act in a certain way. Ekman added to Tomkins’ theory by showing that human facial affects are universal, thus showing that affects are innate.
The findings of Tomkins and Ekman have allowed infant researchers “to examine the correlated sets of facial, vocal, bodily, and autonomic responses of young infants and conceptualize them as discrete affects, with distinctive experiential qualities.” The following affects can be observed in infants:
- Interest/Excitement: the baby “will widen and focus his or her eyes intently on a stimulus, with brows raised or knitted, cheeks raised, and mouth relaxed, holding its limbs relatively quiet, and will tend to scan the stimulus for novelty.”
- Enjoyment/Joy: the baby “will smile and tend to produce relaxed, relatively smooth movements of its limbs, savoring the familiar.”
- Anger/Rage: the baby “will square its mouth, lower and pull its brow together, crying intensely, holding the cry for a long time, then pause for a long inspiration, its face will redden with increased blood flow, and it will tend to kick and thrash its limbs forcefully or arch its back.”
- Distress/Anguish: the baby “will produce a rhythmical cry, with the corners of the mouth pulled down and the inner corners of the brows drawn up, and will tend to move its limbs and head around restlessly.”
Infant Perceptual and Cognitive Capacities. Our understanding of the infant’s perceptual and cognitive abilities has changed since Piaget, who believed the infant “lived in a world of disconnected pieces of reality, with simple, uncoordinated perceptual functions.” We now know that “infants begin with a highly complex and unified perceptual system that is designed to detect abstract invariants in stimulation, such as intensities, rates of movement, contours, mass, and so forth, and that operates across modalities.”
Examples include the following. Infants can recognize the shape of an object they have only had in their mouths (Meltzoff and Borton, 1979). Infants can “match the intensity of a sound with the intensity of a light” (Lewkowicz and Turkewitz, 1980). Infants can “recognize the common temporal structure of present in auditory and visual events, and will match a sound track to the appropriate film on the basis of temporal synchrony.” Infants seem to have object permanence no later than 3 ½ months of age, as they “already understand that objects continue to persist when hidden, that they cannot move through the space occupied by other objects, and that they cannot appear at Point A and then at Point B without traveling from from Point A to Point B (Baillargeon, 1990). Infant’s are most responsive to human voices (Wolf, 1963). Infants are capable of “discriminating and imitating three facial expressions (happy, sad, and surprised) modeled by a life adult” (Field, Woodson, Greenberg, and Cohen, 1982). Infants can “discriminate their own distress cry from the distress of other neonates, of a chimpanzee, and of an older child” (Martin and Clark, 1982).
Infant Organizational Capacities. One study took a group of 3-day-old infants and allowed them to suck on an artificial nipple. The experimenters divided the infants into two groups. When infants in the treatment group stopped sucking on the nipple, the experimenters turned on the recording of a female voice. When infants in the non-treatment group stopped sucking on the nipple, nothing happened. The infants in the treatment group “showed a significant increase in the length of their pauses, thereby demonstrating that they perceived the contingency between the length of their pasuses and the female voice and that they learned to lengthen their pauses in order to turn on the voice” (DeCasper and Carstens, 1981).
In the second phase of the experiment, the experimenters did not play the female voice when infants in the treatment group stopped sucking. These infants became upset when their pauses were no longer followed by the voice. This reaction “suggests that the interest and enjoyment experienced by the infants in the first condition was primarily evoked by the contingency between the infant’s behavior and the stimulus and not by the stimulus itself. This interpretation is strengthened when we remember that the second group of infants heard the voice as well, but lost interest in it because it was not connected to the pattern of sucking and pausing. Thus, the experience of being able to control a stimulus or an event appears to be highly motivating and rewarding to a newborn.”
Does the infant experience itself as separate from the external world? Given that infants can discriminate between voluntary events and involuntary events, “it is only a short step for the infant to realize that voluntary events emanate from the inside and that most involuntary events emanate from the outside.” Additionally, Martin and Clark (1982) found that “calms newborns (18 hours old) cry and that crying newborns continue to cry when they hear the tape-recorded crying of other newborns. However, calm newborns do not respond vocally, and crying newborns stop crying when they hear their own tape-recorded crying. Also, calm neonates do not respond to the cries of a chimpanzee and of an older child, thus they are not simply responding to all averse sound when responding to the cries of other neonates. The authors conclude that neonates are able to discriminate between the cries of others and their own cries.” Putting all the data together, “it becomes almost impossible to imagine how the infant could not discriminate between his or her own behavior and experience and the behavior of others.”
“We can no longer describe development as going from the global diffuse, chaotic, and undifferentiated to the discrete, organized, and differentiated.” But if “we begin with a differentiated, organized infant, equipped with a number of discrete, preadapted, and preorganized functions and human capacities for learning and integrating experience already in operation, then what is developing and changing over time? What is experience contributing?”
(1) The infant goes from being a generalist to a specialist. “Thus, for example, although a newborn will brighten, gaze, and smile at any human face and voice, one or two months later, if an infant has been cared for by a consistent caregiver, only familiar and specific faces and voices will elicit this rection.” “Although the hungry, crying neonate neither knows why he or she is crying or that anything can be done about it, by 3 or 4 weeks of age, if the caregiver has responded predictably to the infant’s cry, the infant will stop crying at the sight or sound of the caregiver’s approach.”
(2) The infant gains a sense of agency, that is, “the knowledge that one’s own efforts are effective in causing something to happen.” It is necessary that the family allows the infant to exercise some agency. Demos describes how this can happen. If an infant grows hungry and the caregiver “responds too early in this sequence of events, for example, at the very first sign of restlessness or vocal whimpering, the infant will receive a remedy before he or she has had the opportunity to become aware of a problem.” The infant must become aware “of a distressed state, wanting it to end, initiating some behaviors to try to achieve that goal, and then receiving comfort and food.” Each infant has “an optimal zone of affective experience” that “is neither too brief and weak, nor too prolonged and intense, that allows enough psychological space for the infant to feel an internal need, to become an active participant in trying to address the need.”
(3) The infant gains muscular strength, “which allows the infant to achieve more instrumental competence.”
(4) The infant learns to “transfer knowledge from one context to another.”
Infant Organizational Capacities. One study took a group of 3-day-old infants and allowed them to suck on an artificial nipple. The experimenters divided the infants into two groups. When infants in the treatment group stopped sucking on the nipple, the experimenters turned on the recording of a female voice. When infants in the non-treatment group stopped sucking on the nipple, nothing happened. The infants in the treatment group “showed a significant increase in the length of their pauses, thereby demonstrating that they perceived the contingency between the length of their pasuses and the female voice and that they learned to lengthen their pauses in order to turn on the voice” (DeCasper and Carstens, 1981).
In the second phase of the experiment, the experimenters did not play the female voice when infants in the treatment group stopped sucking. These infants became upset when their pauses were no longer followed by the voice. This reaction “suggests that the interest and enjoyment experienced by the infants in the first condition was primarily evoked by the contingency between the infant’s behavior and the stimulus and not by the stimulus itself. This interpretation is strengthened when we remember that the second group of infants heard the voice as well, but lost interest in it because it was not connected to the pattern of sucking and pausing. Thus, the experience of being able to control a stimulus or an event appears to be highly motivating and rewarding to a newborn.”
Does the infant experience itself as separate from the external world? Given that infants can discriminate between voluntary events and involuntary events, “it is only a short step for the infant to realize that voluntary events emanate from the inside and that most involuntary events emanate from the outside.” Additionally, Martin and Clark (1982) found that “calms newborns (18 hours old) cry and that crying newborns continue to cry when they hear the tape-recorded crying of other newborns. However, calm newborns do not respond vocally, and crying newborns stop crying when they hear their own tape-recorded crying. Also, calm neonates do not respond to the cries of a chimpanzee and of an older child, thus they are not simply responding to all averse sound when responding to the cries of other neonates. The authors conclude that neonates are able to discriminate between the cries of others and their own cries.” Putting all the data together, “it becomes almost impossible to imagine how the infant could not discriminate between his or her own behavior and experience and the behavior of others.”
What Changes Over Time?
“We can no longer describe development as going from the global diffuse, chaotic, and undifferentiated to the discrete, organized, and differentiated.” But if “we begin with a differentiated, organized infant, equipped with a number of discrete, preadapted, and preorganized functions and human capacities for learning and integrating experience already in operation, then what is developing and changing over time? What is experience contributing?”
(1) The infant goes from being a generalist to a specialist. “Thus, for example, although a newborn will brighten, gaze, and smile at any human face and voice, one or two months later, if an infant has been cared for by a consistent caregiver, only familiar and specific faces and voices will elicit this rection.” “Although the hungry, crying neonate neither knows why he or she is crying or that anything can be done about it, by 3 or 4 weeks of age, if the caregiver has responded predictably to the infant’s cry, the infant will stop crying at the sight or sound of the caregiver’s approach.”
(2) The infant gains a sense of agency, that is, “the knowledge that one’s own efforts are effective in causing something to happen.” It is necessary that the family allows the infant to exercise some agency. Demos describes how this can happen. If an infant grows hungry and the caregiver “responds too early in this sequence of events, for example, at the very first sign of restlessness or vocal whimpering, the infant will receive a remedy before he or she has had the opportunity to become aware of a problem.” The infant must become aware “of a distressed state, wanting it to end, initiating some behaviors to try to achieve that goal, and then receiving comfort and food.” Each infant has “an optimal zone of affective experience” that “is neither too brief and weak, nor too prolonged and intense, that allows enough psychological space for the infant to feel an internal need, to become an active participant in trying to address the need.”
(3) The infant gains muscular strength, “which allows the infant to achieve more instrumental competence.”
(4) The infant learns to “transfer knowledge from one context to another.”
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Demos, E. Virginia. (1992). The early organization of the psyche. In J. W. Barron, M. N. Eagle, & D. L. Wolitzky (Eds.), Interface of psychoanalysis and psychology (pp. 200–232). American Psychological Association.
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