Infant Psychiatry: Infants, Mothers, and Dyads

Abstract

t e E i a t c i s a T here is good consensus that the developmental sciences are foundational to the practice and science of child and adolescent psychiatry. Nonetheless, we are poorly schooled in developmental studies. A look back to the early years of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reveals that many investigators studied development and seriously considered the mother–infant interaction as vital to an understanding of future pathology. Indeed, our second editor, Eveoleen Rexford and colleagues, compiled a Journal Reader, separately published under the rubric, Infant Psychiatry. Four of these articles printed previously in the Journal from 1963 to 1971 seem prescient of an aim currently in vogue to determine the developmental course of those born under so-called normal circumstances in contrast to those infants who carry the burden of risk factors related to genetic loading or unusual variations in maternal care. Bowlby’s study of abandoned children during the second World War had just been published and Spitz’s study of orphanage care ended with the dictum that there was no substitute for mothering, later to be called parenting, to cover the broader possibilities of care-taking. The central theme of these selected articles was to carefully determine and examine the factors contributing to individual differences in developmental competence that were just beginning to come to light as maturation unfolded. Winnicott’s pronouncement that there is no such thing as a baby and the promulgation of “good enough mothering” were relatively new and poorly understood, but these were to become the clinical watchwords that did not deter some from trying to parcel out the roots of individuality. At the time of the studies cited, genetics still meant Mendelian dynamics of molar penetrance. The genome was a dream. Gesell had written the Embryology of Behavior: The Beginnings of the Human Mind, which reminded clinicians that development began at gametization and not parturi-