Book
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.
Main ideas
- The formation of the ego can be described through the embryological concept of the organizer: at nodal points, development is reorganized into levels of increasing complexity.
- Maturation, the unfolding of innate functions, and development, the emergence of functions through exchange with the environment, are separate lines that converge at each organizer.
- Each organizer has a visible indicator: the smiling response for the first, eight-month anxiety for the second, and the gesture and word 'no' for the third.
- Each organizer has its critical period; if it is not established in time, the development that follows rests on a faulty base.
- A failure in establishing an organizer is a source of developmental disturbance, and this is what the theory implies for pathology.
What it shows
- 1959
René Spitz introduced Organizers of the psyche
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.