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.