ABSTRACT
In The First Year of Life, the psychotherapist Rene Spitz imparts some apparently dismayingly cynical information. Spitz focused on how babies smile, and discovered that in the second month of life the human face becomes a preferred visual perception and all other "things" in the infant's environment. A very interesting and curious feature of innate releasing mechanisms is that one’s' can artificially exaggerate them; for example, baby herring gulls get much more excited by a stick that is painted a brighter red than the dull red of their parents' beaks. Similarly, an extreme widening of the adult's mouth provides a supernormal stimulus to a baby. The baby’s and mother grow out of the first phase of symbiosis into the sub-phase of individuation– separation. They might get on splendidly together, or the baby might have to fight for his individuation against various forms of anxiety in the mother.
