The aetiology of infantile schizophrenia in terms of adaptive failure

I much regret having needed to reverse my original intention of being present at the Conference. All I can do is to offer a brief account setting out my personal point of view. Much of what I give here is to be found in the writings of others (notably Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress ¹ ), but my own view developed in the course of my work as a paediatrician in the 1920s and 1930s, and became reformulated in the 1940s when I began to have my own way of stating the essential stages of the intertwined physical and emotional development of the human infant. ²