ABSTRACT
Different accounts of normal development of the individual infant rest on two divergent psychoanalytic frameworks, those of one-person and two-person psychologies. Those accounts of normal infant development that focus on the movement from merger and symbiosis to individuation are based on one-person psychologies, which rest on the various premises of drive theory. Most relevant to developmental theory is the premise that babies are born into the world as drive-dominated organisms, and that only gradually do they come to discriminate, on both purely perceptual and on psychological bases, that they are separate from104 their environmental surround. Given this premise, individuation comes to be the hallmark of personal development. Two-person psychologies, on the other hand, tend to stress aspects of integrity in the baby from the beginning and to consider the baby’s capacity for rudimentary integrative functioning on both perceptual and psychological levels. The developmental focus, then, is not on separation and individuation, but on object-relating and connectedness. Since much of the recent work in two-person psychology tends to focus on adult psychology and on the psychoanalytic treatment process, the logical implications for an account of the course of normal development are often missed, and those who embrace two-person psychologies often continue to regard merger and symbiosis as normal developmental markers.
