ABSTRACT
The exponential growth of scientific data necessitates a re-assessment of psychoanalytic theory of emotional development. The early developmental theories formulated by Sigmund Freud and his students, as well as those of most later psychoanalytical writers, were, by and large, inferred from reconstruction arrived at during the process of psychoanalysis of adults or older children. J. Bowlby revolutionized psychoanalytic theory of emotional development when he demonstrated that the human infant, like all newborn mammals, actively seeks physical closeness to his mother or her substitute. In spite of the vast amount of developmental data, or perhaps because of it, it is not yet possible to outline a coherent model of a developmental matrix, but some significant relations do emerge. The chapter suggests that the development in each of the areas–neural, motor, perceptual, cognitive, and social-emotional–is not merely an unfolding of separate pre-existent developmental sequences, facilitated or inhibited by environment.
