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.