Final

Question 1

Discuss the differences between the clinical infant and the observed infant?

Answer 1

Clinical Infant
Psychoanalysis
Joint creation of two people - the now grown infant (client) and the therapist (who has a theory about the client’s infant experience)
Composed of subjective experience, life narratives, and what it felt like to live our own subjective lives, made up memories, present reenactments in transference and theoretically guided interpretations.
The narrated infant
Observed Infant:
Developmental Psychology
A description of capacities that can be observed directly
Ability to move, smile, seek novelty, discriminate mother’s face, encode memories.
Reveal little about the “felt quality “ of lived social experience.

Question 2

What role if any might reconstruction play in understanding development?

Answer 2

Integral part of understanding development
In reconstructing the past, the story is discovered and altered by both the teller and the listener in the course of the telling
Competing theories of development are all focusing on different things, depending upon what each theorist believes to be salient experiences, and the theories that they ascribe will define the shape of the clinical infant
Think about the idea of “useful fiction”

Question 3

What are the inherent limits in models developed solely drawn from clinical experiences/observations?

Answer 3

Can only provide behavioral information as opposed to subjective internal states
Inferences have to be made, which would depend on the observer’s own subjective experience

Question 4

What did Winnicott mean when he said, “There was no such thing as a baby.”

Answer 4

“There was no such thing as a baby”

Winnicott used the statement “there is no such thing as a baby” to capture the idea that mother and infant form an inseparable unit. Whenever we encounter an infant we also encounter maternal care, without which there would be no infant.

Question 5

In what ways is self regulation a function of the dyad? How does the dyadic regulation or regulation by the other become self regulation?

Answer 5

The early environment is fundamentally a social environment, and that the primary social object who mediates the physical environment to the infant is the mother. The mother’s modulatory function is essential not only to every aspect of the infant’s current functioning, but also to the child’s continuing development. Her essential role as the psychobiological regulator of the child’s immature psycho-physiological systems directly influences the child’s biochemical growth processes which support the genesis of new structures.