ABSTRACT
Human beings are, by nature, theory-making animals. Our heightened capacity for abstract, symbolic thinking distinguishes us from other forms of life, and infant research indicates just how early in life attempts to organize, synthesize, and make sense of stimuli begin (Greenspan, 1989; Stern, 1977, 1985; Talberg, Cuoto-Rosa, and O'Donnell, 1988). Stern (1985) notes that by three months of age infants form a schema of objects, events, and persons. The internal mental picture fosters in the infant an expectation of how things should sound, look, or smell. 1 The discrepancies between the infant's expectation (preverbal prototheories, if you will) and stimuli generate and maintain the infant's attention, provide cognitive stimulation, and allow for new learning and the development of new and more complex constructs. Piaget (1970) noted that the interchanges of the infant with the environment are, in essence, problem-solving arrangements designed to incorporate the new experiences into ever-enlarging cognitive and affective schemata. In describing cognitive development, he noted how the action-oriented thinking and “theorizing” of the preoperational child (as far as sensorimotor intelligence) changes into a more internal conceptual and socialized form of thinking and theorizing as the child's mind develops. As Brown (this volume) points out, the development of formal operational thinking in adolescence facilitates the incorporation and integration of affect into elaborate philosophical, scientific, or religious belief systems. What Hartmann (1938) called the “synthetic function of the ego” (which includes the capacity for the creation of increasingly complex schema and for symbolization) seems inborn and to some degree autonomous. Although we may accept the notion of inborn and autonomous ego energy wired for increasing integration and synthesis, the extent to which this energy can, at any stage of development, be utilized to fully develop synthesizing and explanatory functions is dictated not only by an individual's innate capacities but also by environmental response. Learning, as Piaget noted, proceeds through attachment in human relations. The caretaker helps or inhibits these synthesizing, symbolic, and theory-making abilities. The manner in which she continuously shows the infant her own ways of organizing experience and affect are part of the matrix in and from which the infant begins to organize himself, his affects, and his relations with others. 2 As Winnicott (1971) suggested, there is an overlap in this development between what the mother supplies and the child can conceive. Clearly, the child learns and begins to theorize about himself, about his mother, and about the world she introduces within the affective ambience that mother and child establish. The ambience is internalized by the infant and, in turn, influences its developing cognitive and affective schema. This aspect of mother–child interaction contributes to a quality of mind and spirit within the child, which may provide the stimulus and space for her to play and formulate—on whatever level of cognitive and affective development she has attained—ideas about herself, her experiences, and her culture. The child's developing and increasingly complex, interwoven affective and cognitive schema and the associated mother–child relationship in which they are created find combined expression in the developing child's theories about herself and the world about her. Theories, psychoanalytic ones included, develop out of and often continue to represent in transformed, symbolic form particular aspects of earliest object relations. These aspects of early object relations and their associated emotions, along with the defensive positions and creative possibilities that grew out of them, find sublimated expression in theories espoused and the emotional attachment to them.
