ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to elucidate some aspects only of the infant's emotional life during Anna Freud first year, and have selected these with particular emphasis on anxieties, defences and object-relations. Fundamental steps in the modification of persecutory and depressive anxiety are part of the development during the first year. The depressive position is bound up with fundamental changes in the infant's libidinal organization, for during this period—about the middle cf the first year—the infant enters upon the stages of the direct and inverted Oedipus complex. The infantile neurosis can be regarded as a combination of processes by which anxieties of a psychotic nature are bound, worked through and modified. A characteristic feature of the infantile neurosis is the phobias which begin during the first year of life and, changing in form and content, appear and reappear throughout the years of childhood.
