Our Needs for Others and Its Roots in Infancy

Abstract

Published by Tavistock Publications, 1987; 444 pages; £14.95. In this book Josephine Klein creatively synthesises a good deal of the psychoanalytic and other literature about the way in which very young babies come to make sense of the world and, hence, the way in which we as therapists should approach the baby in us all. As she points out, there are many ways of trying to understand the emotional life of babies, and she has largely described and synthesised what has become known as the object-relations approach. The lineage she traces stems from Bowlby, Balint, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Guntrip on the one hand, and Kohut and Kernberg on the other, with a look along the way at some other authors such as Frances Tustin on infant autism and Marguerite Sechehaye's work with Renée, a schizophrenic girl.The book begins with a digest of some of the neuropsychological evidence about the way in which we form concepts and come to join our ideas and experiences together. I enjoyed this section of the book and found it a novel and useful inclusion in a work on psychotherapy. It has always seemed to me a pity that Freud's interest in relating psychoanalytical processes to biological ones has been seen as a kind of physical reductionism and has fallen out of favour. The physiology of emotions is much less understood than that of visual or cognitive processes. Many of the issues raised by the research are relevant to debates within psychotherapy -for example, the evidence that we are not born as whole selves, but are integrated by certain kinds of experiences. An imprtant aspect of the book is that it attempts to explain not so much pathological forms of experience but normal good-enough health, which in many ways is harder to describe. The author takes up Balint's distinction between those people who seek to merge with others and those whose tendency is to want to escape, to be free. She tries -not always successfully -to avoid value judgements about different kinds of personality in order to produce a more complex and differentiated account of health.Much of the recent work on the world of the very young baby has been summarised in Daniel Stern's book on the interpersonal world of the human infant, and it is a pity that it appeared too late to be incorporated into this book. In many ways it fleshes out what is described here and also suggests new ways of understanding just how the infant experiences (m)others (Josephine Klein's ingenious coinage). For example, the infant can be shown to react to and recognise characteristic patterns of movement and being moved, of qualities of sequences of movement as well as to smell, sight and sound. As it is, the author draws on extensive quotations from the psychoanalytic literature, poetry, and (for the visualisers) a series of diagrams based broadly on set theory to illustrate her points.It is always instructive to compare different writers' views of babies, those fascinating Rorschach blots. Whereas the Melanie-Klein baby often seems to be having rather a hard time, beset by demon...

Two decades of self‐leadership theory and research

“…In addition, self-regulation theory suggests a hierarchical organization of the self-regulatory system in the form of superordinate and subordinate feedback loops or goals (Carver and Scheier, 1998;Powers, 1973). This hierarchy of goals ranges from systems concepts such as a globalized sense of the idealized self (see also Burke, 1991;Klein, 1987), to overarching principles of what a person wants to be, to more specified programs of behavior that indicate what a person should do in order to conform to higher-level principles, and finally, to specific sequences of behavior that facilitate program goal attainment (Carver and Scheier, 1998). Self-regulation theory further assumes that goals at the various hierarchical levels function simultaneously in shaping behavior but that there is a natural upward drift toward higher levels of goal abstraction as a person becomes more comfortable with his or her behavior Wegner, 1985, 1987).…”

Exploring innovative methodologies for child‐centric consumer research

“…The school selected as the site for our study educates children in their "middle years" (ages four to eleven), which was regarded as a suitable age group for our study. Within these ages children become increasingly aware of their self-identity yet there are varying opinions about when this process begins (refer Belk et al, 1982;James and Prout, 1990), with Klein (1987) arguing this begins at the onset of birth. However, by including children between the ages of four and eleven, we addressed these conflicting arguments, and also focused on an age group that are less often studied (James et al, 1998).…”

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