
stimulus overload, action cycles, and the completion gradient
systematic inquiries into the origin of certain emotional disturbances
of infants show that consistent maternal care is vital for the
child's normal physical, psychic, and social development, indeed,
for his survival.  the most elementary precondition for consistent
maternal care is the physical presence of the mother or her substitute.
it has, however, become increasingly apparent that children's
development can also be stunted, and that they suffer damage of
varying extent by the attention of, and close contact with, a mother
who dispenses what seems to be the "wrong kind of mothering".
a model of the mother-baby interaction is proposed to explicate
the dynamics of the "wrong kind of mothering" and its
consequences: my proposition is that the mutual exchanges between
mother and baby consist in a give and take of action and
reaction between the two partners, which requires from each
of them both active and passive responses.  these responses form
series and chains, the single links of which consist in what i call
"action cycles," each completed in itself and at the same time
anticipating the next link.  i designated these seriated response
exchanges as the "precursor of dialogue," as a primal dialogue.
the dialogue acts as a vector of the baby's development,
influencing its direction and stimulating it to adaptive efforts and
psychic growth.  it follows that inappropriate mothering (quantitatively
as well as qualitatively) results in what is referred to at
this time as the "derailment" of the primal dialogue.
controlled experiments with animals, findings of experimental
psychology, and, lastly, clinical findings illustrate the
mechanics of the derailed dialogue and its sequelae.
in the cases under review a surfeit of stimulation, a psychic
overloading, resulted in the derailment of dialogue.  overloading
prevents its subject from completing actions or responses initiated
by him.  long-lasting overload results in the cumulation of "incompleted
action cycles".  the sequelae of this cumulation are
profound changes in the behavior of the individual.  these changes
are manifested in a departure from the norms of individual and
social behavior patterns that are maladaptive for the individual
and asyntonic with his society, that is, asocial.
the derailment of the dialogue is triggered, perhaps even
caused,
by the nature of the social setting.  one setting, over-population,
is extensively discussed in connection with an animal
experiment, and the implications for the human community are
examined.
