Stability and Instability in the Newborn Infant: The Quest for Elusive Threads

The resurgence of interest in the human newborn began almost 20 years ago. We have, in this time, learned that newborns fixate visual stimuli discriminatively (Fantz 1963), are conditionable (Siqueland Self, Horowitz, Miller, Hassanein, & Hensleigh 1977). In trying to predict developmental outcomes, we have continually searched for specific events that are responsible for adverse development. However, the accumulated evidence indicates that there are no simple continuities between specific events-or even constellations of events either prenatally or perinatally-and the subsequent developmental course of the