Stability and Instability in the Newborn Infant: The Quest for Elusive Threads

Abstract

The resurgence of interest in the human newborn began almost 20 years ago. We have, in this time, learned that newborns fixate visual stimuli discriminatively (Fantz 1963), are conditionable (Siqueland & Lipsitt 1966), respond to olfactory stimuli (Engen & Lipsitt 1965; Self, Horowitz, & Paden 1972), process auditory information (Graham, Clifton, & Hatton 1968), show interactive attending patterns (Stechler, Bradford, & Levy 1966), and habituate to repeated visual stimulation (Friedman 1972). The normal newborn thus appears on the scene equipped to interact, or, as Sameroff (1975) would have it, transact business. Our understanding of the newborn's competence has been augmented by an appreciation that birth is only an event on a continuum of a journey begun 9 months before. This gestational course is not an isolated set of biological events but one subject as well to environmental influences mediated by the mother's behavior (Lubchenco 1976; Miller, Hassanein, & Hensleigh 1977). In trying to predict developmental outcomes, we have continually searched for specific events that are responsible for adverse development. However, the accumulated evidence indicates that there are no simple continuities between specific events-or even constellations of events either prenatally or perinatally-and the subsequent developmental course of the