Infancy—Systems/Behavioral Models
Subject of study—mother/infant dyad
Infant and mother are equal participants in
interaction
Focus of study—how each member of
dyad influences other member
Contrasts with Organismic/Psychoanalytic
Models
 Infant’s subjective experience not important—only
behavioral manifestations
 Infant accurately apprehends reality and real aspects of
mother
 Mother, therefore, has a real influence on infant (Bowlby
as Klein’s supervisee)
 One-person versus two-person model—both members of
dyad are equally responsible for construction of shared
reality
 Implications for interactions between couples
 Implications for interactions between patient and therapist
 Absence of aggressive, sexual drives
Stern’s Model of the Origins of Infant
Psychopathology
 The first relationship—to mom—is prototype for
all future relationships
 Successful mother-infant interaction—affect
regulation
Based on mother’s ability to interpret optimal levels of
infant arousal
Based on infant’s threshold of stimulation and
organization of affect
Based on mutual ability to negotiate a meaningful,
shared dialogue (goal-correctedness)
Failure of affect regulation
Maternal overstimulation/infant hyperarousal
No opportunity to regulate flow of affective
information and thus feel in control of external or
internal world
Contingently overstimulating mothers
Noncontingently overstimulating mothers (“better to
respond badly than to be nonresponsive”)
Effects on infant
• Dissociating—splitting all perception
• Motoric inhibition (“going limp”)
Infant exceptionally sensitive to stimuli (e.g., drugexposed infants)
• Severely protective behaviors
• Withdrawing behaviors
Maternal understimulation/infant hypoarousal
Incompetence in performing stimulating behaviors
that produce optimal levels of arousal
Interferences in performing these behaviors (e.g.,
depression)
Mothers who feel rejected and in turn reject the
infant (under or overstimulating?)
Effects on infant—feeling that infant cannot control
external world or internal state
Infant exceptionally insensitive to stimuli—mother
must work harder
Paradoxical stimulation
Stimulating only at times when infant is in pain or
danger
• Mother’s interest becomes associated with self-inflicted
pain
• Origins of sado-masochism
Avoiding full contact and full disengagement
Engagement and disengagement are
prototypes for attachment and separation
later in development
Bowlby/Ainsworth’s Model of the Origins
of Infant Psychopathology
 Evolutionary theory—mother and infant try to maximize
protection (stimulated by fear, fatigue, or sickness) from
external danger through two behaviors
 Proximity-seeking
 Contact-maintenance
 Outcomes when survival is threatened through caregiver
unavailability
 Anxiety
 Anger
 Disbelief at loss
 Searching for reunion
 Detachment
Homeostasis (regulation) of feelings of
security
Physiological control systems—anxiety, anger,
searching
Environmental control systems—emotional
availability
Failures in secure attachment
Attachment behavior de-activated—defensive
exclusion (avoidant infants)
Interference with loving and being loved because fear
of rejection
“False self” or narcissism develops
Attachment behavior hyper-activated
(resistant/ambivalent infants)
 Inconsistency in mother’s availability and responsiveness
 Preoccupation and intense anger develops (BPD?)
 Implications: Developmental pathways to clinical
depression (Brown & Harris, 1978)
Severe current adverse event—personal loss or
disappointment
Absence of companion in whom to confide (secure 6
age)
Difficult living conditions—feelings of insecurity
Loss of mother before age 11
Other developmental outcomes
Avoidant infants
Aggressive toward peers
Noncompliant
Avoidant
Ambivalent infants
Easily frustrated
Not persistent
Not competent
Developmental Sequences in Other
Populations (DS, Maltreatment)
DS infants proceed through same
developmental sequences but at slower
rate—integration of ecological self is
difficult
Linguistic representations of self are less
mature and differentiated
Ecological self is intact—able to perceive nature
of relationship between the person and
environment
Maltreated infants develop self differently
Self-recognition accompanied by negative
affect (shameful or bad feelings about self)
Internal state language less mature, less
elaborated, less able to discuss internal states
of self and other, less able to discuss negative
internal states (“false self”)