ABSTRACT
The analyst of adults has little concern in Ernst Kris clinical work with the concept of normality, except marginally, where functioning is concerned. We can trace the combinations which lead from the infant’s complete emotional dependence to the adult’s comparative self-reliance and mature sex and object relationships, a gradated developmental line which provides the indispensable basis for any assessment of emotional maturity or immaturity, normality or abnormality. Although for the whole of early childhood the child’s life will be dominated by body needs, body impulses, and their derivatives, the quantities and qualities of satisfactions and dissatisfactions are determined not by himself but by environmental influence. It is one thing for the child analyst to reconstruct a patient’s past or trace back symptoms to their origins in earliest years, and quite a different one to spot pathogenic agents before they have done their work.
