Sublime

Few scientists have done more to refute the myth of the asocial infant than Andrew Meltzoff, whose work in childhood development, psychology, and neuroscience over the past several decades has lent support to Girard’s discovery.

Generally, Harlow’s experiments showed the toxicity of early isolation: physically healthy infant primates who were separated from their mothers during the first year of life grew into socially crippled adults. The monkeys failed to develop the ability to solve problems or understand the social cues of others. They became depressed,

Analyst and patient, like mother and infant, work in that intermediate area of illusion which is always vulnerable to pre-emptive intrusion.

In fact, by age one, infants use their own early cultural knowledge to figure out who tends to know things, and then use this performance information to focus their learning, attention, and memory. Infants are well known to engage in what developmental psychologists call “social referencing.” When an infant, or young child, encounters something

the doctor’s unanxious recognition of the child’s predicament, what Winnicott calls elsewhere ‘appreciative understanding’, is itself an intervention. The doctor is ‘meeting need with appropriate action, or studied inaction’.34