Getting to know the self and others: Babies’ interactions with other babies.

This article explores what it means to know a person as distinct from the self. It uses examples of interactions between pairs of same-aged babies. I hope to illustrate the relevance of psychoanalytic concepts, focusing particularly on defences against anxiety, primitive phantasy and the account of the depressive position put forward by Melanie Klein. This refers to a phase rather than a stage development, or a reorientation in mental life through which the infant deals with the painful consequences of loving and hating impulses directed towards the same person or love object. The study involved six pairs of same-aged babies followed longitudinally. The babies in each pair knew each other before the study began and saw each other regularly outside it and covered the development period from 6 to 24 months. Many similarities were observed between these infant peers and observations of siblings (Dunn et al 1988) stressing affective dynamics encouraging the child to engage in the social world, in contrast to the conflict involved in being faced with someone else’s point of view. It is possible that, through the frequency of contact, something like a family dynamic may have been operating for these peers. However, it is also possible that the study illustrates more general developmental tasks of this age: that is the infant’s problem may not be to ‘get in to someone else’s shoes’ but to move out again, and that in this process the child has to give up being the baby in order to become a child. The peer study highlights particularly acutely how early experiences of separateness bring with them both an awareness of a loss and a powerful phantasy of being displaced.