Concept
Organizers of the psyche
René Spitz's term, borrowed from embryology, for the nodal points in the infant's first two years at which separate currents of maturation and development converge and the psyche is reorganized at a more complex level. Each organizer is announced by a visible indicator: the smiling response at about three months, eight-month anxiety in the second half of the first year, and the gesture and word 'no' in the second year. Spitz held that when an organizer is not established in its time, later development builds on a faulty base. Later findings on the newborn's early capacities for interaction cast doubt on the embryological model.
Development
1959
introduced by René Spitz
Spitz set out his principle of organizers in A Genetic Field Theory of Ego Formation (1959) and built The First Year of Life around it.
In A Genetic Field Theory of Ego Formation: Its Implications for Pathology (1959);The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (1965)
Relations
- 1959 introduced by René Spitz
Spitz set out his principle of organizers in A Genetic Field Theory of Ego Formation (1959) and built The First Year of Life around it.
Works
- 1959
A Genetic Field Theory of Ego Formation: Its Implications for Pathology
Spitz's Freud Anniversary Lecture for the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, published in 1959, offers a model of how the ego takes shape in the first two years of life. From experimental embryology he takes the idea of the organizer, a centre that steers the development of the tissues around it. He argues that psychic development proceeds in a comparable way: at certain nodal points, lines of maturation and of development that had run separately converge and are integrated into a new and more complex level of organization. Each of these organizers of the psyche is announced by a visible behavioural indicator: the smiling response to the human face around the third month, anxiety at the stranger around the eighth month, and the head-shake and word 'no' in the second year. Spitz contends that each organizer has its time. When one is not established when it is due, development goes on regardless, but it is built on a faulty base, and the deviation is carried into later stages. The lecture closes by drawing out what this developmental model implies for the understanding of psychopathology.
- 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
- A Genetic Field Theory of Ego Formation: Its Implications for Pathology1959Evidence for a relation
- The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations1965Evidence for a relation