Concept
Smiling response
The smile with which an infant of about two to three months greets a human face seen from the front and in motion. René Spitz and Katherine Wolf found that at this age it is set off by a configuration of forehead, eyes and nose rather than by a particular person, and will be given even to a mask, while in the second half of the year it becomes reserved for familiar people. Spitz made it the indicator of the first organizer of the psyche: it marks the infant's shift from responding to inner bodily stimuli to perceiving the outside world, and the arrival of the precursor of the object, the stage before the mother is recognised as a person in her own right.
Development
1946
developed by René Spitz
Spitz and Wolf's 1946 monograph studied the infant's smile at the human face, which Spitz later made the indicator of the first organizer and of the precursor of the object.
In The Smiling Response: A Contribution to the Ontogenesis of Social Relations (1946)
Relations
- 1946 developed by René Spitz
Spitz and Wolf's 1946 monograph studied the infant's smile at the human face, which Spitz later made the indicator of the first organizer and of the precursor of the object.
Works
- 1946
The Smiling Response: A Contribution to the Ontogenesis of Social Relations
In this monograph René Spitz and Katherine Wolf study the infant's smile as a contribution to the ontogenesis of social relations. From about the third month, they report, infants smile at a human face seen from the front and in motion. They smile even at a mask that keeps the forehead, eyes and nose, but not at a face seen in profile. In the second half of the first year the smile becomes selective and is withheld from strangers. The authors read the smiling response as the infant's first active turning towards a human partner and an early step in the development of social and object relations.
See also
People
References
- The Smiling Response: A Contribution to the Ontogenesis of Social Relations1946Evidence for a relation