"The First Year of Life"

Not only did Spitz work with babies who were going through the stages of life mentioned above, but he also studied infants who stayed with their mothers and how they developed differently from those who were away from their mothers. This evidence is written about in his book, THE FIRST YEAR OF LIFE: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations.


Within the pages of this book, there are three stages of development in the first 15 months of life that are written about. The first stage that babies go through is what Spitz calls, “the objectless stage.” This happens within the first three months of life, the child is vocal. The infant will tend to repeat the same sounds over and over again because he likes hearing himself and he is distinguishing certain sounds for certain things. The next stage would be the “precursor of the object.” This happens about six months later and it is when the child begins the process of imitating sounds from her mother. This is also during the time of what is called “the smiling response.” This response occurs when the child recognizes his mother’s face and smiles at her. This is significant because it shows that there has been a connection made in memory. The last stage is the “libidinal object” stage. From about eight to fifteen months, the infant begins to imitate words used by his mother and smiles when he sees her.

Spitz says, “This is the stage at which the infant turns from what I have called reception of stimuli coming from the inside to the perception of stimuli coming from the outside. This transition is predicated on the infant’s achieving the capacity temporarily to suspend the unconditional functioning of the pleasure-unpleasure principle, which demands his undivided attention to the stimuli coming from inside. Instead hi can now suspend this demand long enough to cathect the presentation of external stimuli which are transmitted by the sensorium. In short, the reality principle has begun to function….the infant is now able to recognize the human face and to indicate this by smiling in response to it shows that memory traces have been laid down.”

In order for this to occur, there has to be continuous contact between the infant and its mother. This is what Spitz called the “dyad.” This mother-child relationship is also addressed in THE FIRST YEAR OF LIFE: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations.