ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes some general principles and concepts to be used as a framework for organizing some of our knowledge of children. The infant's constitution includes primitive forms of the mental equipment serving perception, motility, thinking, memory, and other abilities which help the individual gradually to perceive and deal with reality. The infant's constitution includes also instinctual drives which have characteristic phases and go through various developments that are codetermined by endowment factors and by interaction with the environment. The concept of typical sequences and typical phases in a child's development has gained general acceptance. The determinants of a child's development are his innate characteristics, the characteristics of the environment with all that this implies, and the phase of the child's development in which a particular stimulus or experience occurs. The most basic need of the infant is for a person, one who will respond to his distress signals, for relief of tension, and for an interactive social partner.
