Object Concept and Object Relations in Childhood Psychosis: A Pilot Study

Abstract

The two master theories of human development, the Freudian and Piagetan, have evolved in parallel fashion without ever meeting. The advent of ‘ego metapsychology’ brought the two systems closer together, to be finally correlated by Anthony, Wolff, et al. The role of the mother is primordial in both cognitive and psychoanalytic systems. As already shown experimentally by Gouin-Décarie the two systems are interconnected in that a failure or fixation in the libidinal development is accompanied by an ‘adherence’ in the cognitive sphere. The aim of this pilot study was to verify the hypothesis that any condition accompanied or caused by a severe disturbance in the mother-child relationship will result in severe mental retardation or arrest in cognitive development within the sensorio-motor stage. The sample was composed of twenty randomly selected children (age range: 3 to 9 years), divided into a psychotic sub-group and a non-psychotic one, the latter serving as control. These children were attending the Pride of Judea Day School in New York City. All had a complete psychiatric and psychological evaluation, plus a detailed developmental history, carried out independently of this research. The Piagetan Test of Sensorio-Motor development elaborated by Gouin-Décarie was administered to both groups. The results showed that an ‘adherence’ of cognitive development to the sensorio motor stage was positively correlated with Early Infantile Autism and Mental Retardation. In order to further clarify this correlation the subjects' early development in their first two years of life was scrutinized using a check list of autistic signs. A statistically highly significant correlation could then be established between the arrest of cognitive development in the sensorio motor stage and an autistic type of development within the first two years of life, irrespective of diagnosis. In view of these findings it seems pointless to apply interpretative psychotherapies to these children or to submit them to standard kindergarten techniques when they lack the very rudiments for abstract thinking.