Concept
Eight-month anxiety
The distress an infant shows in the second half of the first year when a stranger approaches: turning away, hiding its face, crying. René Spitz, who named it, took it as the first true anxiety and as the sign that the infant now tells its mother apart from everyone else and has formed a libidinal object; he read it as a reaction to the mother's absence, the stranger's face being registered as not the mother's. In his scheme it is the second organizer of the psyche, marking the stage of the libidinal object proper. It is distinguished from separation anxiety, and attachment theory later gave its own account of the fear of strangers.
Development
Undated
introduced by René Spitz
Spitz named the infant's fear of strangers eight-month anxiety, called it the first true anxiety and made it the mark of the libidinal object proper.
In The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (1965)
Relations
- introduced by René Spitz
Spitz named the infant's fear of strangers eight-month anxiety, called it the first true anxiety and made it the mark of the libidinal object proper.
- diverges from Separation anxiety
Spitz explained the infant's distress at a stranger by the mother's absence, but the two anxieties have been held to be clinically distinct, since each can appear without the other.
Works
- 1965
The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations
René Spitz's principal book, written with W. Godfrey Cobliner, expands his French work La première année de la vie de l'enfant (1958), which grew in turn from a 1954 paper on the genesis of the first object relations. Drawing on direct and filmed observation of infants, it traces the development of object relations through three stages: an objectless stage, a stage of the precursor of the object, and the stage of the libidinal object proper. The passages between them are marked by the smiling response and eight-month anxiety, and the acquisition of "no" follows. The dialogue between mother and child holds a central place throughout. The later chapters treat the pathology of object relations. They distinguish disturbances caused by an unsuitable quality of maternal attitude from the emotional deficiency diseases caused by its absence, namely anaclitic depression and hospitalism.
See also
People
References
- The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations1965Evidence for a relation