Infant Development Part 1 | Prenatal & Postnatal Development

The most interesting thing in the last 20 years in the field of psychology has been the explosion of the neurosciences and and neurology and the expansion of technologies designed to scan the human brain, including the brain of infants and what we have now is developmental neuroscience psychoanalytic work infant observation developmental psychology . The good news it appears is that it is almost never too late there may be critical periods that is a phrase in developmental psychology that retain some way. It is a important to get things done in the right order that is true, and in addition to that now we see it is never too late to make significant improvements. On the one hand we see now more and more the absolute centrality of earliest stages of infant development which puts a great deal of pressure frankly on young parents who being young parents are probably least able to get the necessary jobs done alone. And the hopefulness of extended adult development that will allow adaptively almost anyone at any age to move back into a healthy developmental process. Including it seems increasing brain volume and neurological sophistication and interconnectivity even if substantially later dates than we thought previously worked were possible, so the other thing neurological sciences shown is that there seems to be rather a dramatic split between the left brain and the right brain.

One of the latest developing areas the prenatal experience and postnatal development brief preview we have backed up the importance of the earliest perinatal phase of development. There is a great deal of very recent research just the last 10 years. It suggests that prenatal experience may even be as important as the postnatal experience. We have underestimated the power of fetal development and its subsequent impact on the life trajectory. I will address briefly sexual development beginning in infancy if not before. Most people have been talking about for the last several decades is when do you feed a child, what kind of formula is best. Is breast-feeding better than formula, when should this child sit up, when does the child begin sleeping in its own crib away from the mothers bedroom. All of those external developmental milestones the people of the struggling with literally for decades. I am not saying they are not important.

Of course there important, but what seems now to be a necessary prerequisite for those to happen at all is the shift from external reality to the psychic reality of the mother first, and then the link between the mother’s psychic reality and the growing nascent psychic reality of the baby. That is where most of this developmental research is taking place and this is where virtually all of the neurological science were all of that is going and I think if you cannot hold open that idea than most of these lectures are going to be at the very least confusing. I will be speaking mostly about the baby’s psychic reality and about the mother and father’s psychic reality. To access that to be open to the experience of that is is what this is all about. I think one of the things that all the theories agree on now is that without that shift in focus from external the internal the external never gets done. There is developmental derailment that makes the schedule of external development impossible to meet that without the internal psychic reality focus we never get to things it gets derailed . The internal focus is the necessary prerequisite now seen to all of the developmental milestones in all mental illness.