ABSTRACT
First signs of social response. It is difficult if not impossible to get any evidence of innate bases of affection from the child’s attitude towards parents, because of all that is done for the child by the mother and father in the early months. The infant’s greater comfort in the presence of the mother is well known. In earlier chapters I have shown how fear responses, and even reflexes, may vary according to whether the infant is in the arms of the mother or not. It is quite comprehensible on general grounds that the accumulation of hundreds of associations of the satisfaction of hunger and other cravings by the mother make her pre-eminent in the affections of the infant in early months.
