Abstract
Psychopathology in infancy is often attributed to abnormal interactive experiences. For example, social withdrawal (Bakeman & Brown, 1977; Brazelton,
Kowslowski, & Main, 1974; Field, 1977; Massie, 1978; Stem, 1971, 1977),
failure to thrive (Greenspan, 1982), and depression (Cohn & Tronick, 1983;
Zahn-Waxler, McKnew, Cummings, Davenport, & Radke-Yarrow, 1984) have
been linked to aberrant interpersonal relations. The underlying view is that the
infant who experiences abnormally stressful interactions learns to cope with them
in a particular fashion, but that his learned pattern of social interaction and
coping is also abnormal. Consequently, when the infant utilizes his pattern in
other, potentially normal, interactions, it distorts them, making them abnormal,
too. This engenders an insidious, self-reinforcing, interactive cycle in which the
infant's repeated distortion of otherwise normal interactions stresses him, compelling him again and again to adopt his coping response, which further reinforces the learned, or internalized, aberrant pattern.