Chance, structure, stress: the birth and development of the human mind-brain

Recent physiological studies of the human mind-brain lend support to the theory of object relations, and in particular to the manner in which the object of the early period enters the infant's dawning psyche to elicit a perdurable pattern of both positive and negative response to stimuli. The psychoanalytic concept of reactivation, and the psychoanalytic view of language as (in part) a substitute for the absent object, are linked with specific cerebral mechanisms to disclose the bodily realities that underlie emotive disturbance.