Patterns of mother-infant behavior and subsequent childhood psychosis: A research and case report

Abstract

This paper discusses and illustrates a case from research based on the analysis of home movies of the infancies of children wholater came to psychiatric attention and were diagnosed as suffering from early childhood psychosis. Examination of the infant's behavior in the first months of life indicated normal attachment modalities—clinging, gazing and smiling, feeding, and touching—although the infant was somewhat less than normally active compared to control babies. By contrast, the mother did not reciprocate the child's movements toward ventral-ventral contact and even prevented ventral-ventral closeness from occurring. Further correlation of the prospective-like film data was made with the mother-child phenomena observed and understood when the child was 4 and the family came to treatment. This indicated that the deviant behavior had complex structures embedded in the mother-child relationship that are visible in simpler form in the filmed mother-child interactions from the first months of the child's life. Examples from the child's therapy are presented along with paradigmatic sequences from the film record of the first year of life. The findings and associated hypotheses are discussed in connection with other recent research that delineates the profound, often biologically released, ways in which infants and mothers interact from the time of the infańts' birth, with consequences for the development of nervous system, psychological, and behavior structures.