ABSTRACT
This chapter presents, verbatim, selections from the unpublished memoirs and essays that Myrtle McGraw wrote between the 1960s and 1980s. McGraw's papers are now located in the special collections of Millbank Memorial Library, Teacher's College, Columbia University. During the mid-1920s, new institutes and centers were being established for the study of infancy and early child development at many academic institutions throughout this country and in Europe, notably Austria. The design of the laboratory at Briarcliff was based on that developed during the 1930s at Babies Hospital, but it was significantly different. In the Briarcliff laboratory, it was the students not the teacher who handled and focused observation on the infant's behavior. Neurologists discovered that an infant's brain emits alpha waves in a charac-teristic pattern called a Berger Rhythm. It is precisely the question of cortical involvement that indicates a need for reassessment of the behavior data in the light of advanced neurological knowledge.
