Milk

A baby does not live by milk alone. No less essential to healthy growth, and even to life itself, is mother love. Psychiatrists who had recognized this for a generation or more sat alongside general physicians and social workers at the New York Academy of Medicine in Manhattan last week to see one of the striking visual proofs: Psychoanalyst Rene A. Spitz' 20 minute film, Grief.

Dr. Spitz was doing research at a foundling home in a Latin American country (which he refuses to identify) when he started shooting his film. It was an old, established home, well equipped and, by all material standards, well run. Its 91 infant inmates had plenty of good food, clothing, light and air, and toys. Competent nurses fed and bathed them regularly. Only one thing was lacking: the nurses, each with ten children to care for, were too busy to stop and play with their charges. "Each infant had the equivalent of one-tenth of a mother," said Dr. Spitz, "and this was not enough."

Three months in this "model" home, he said, was sufficient to produce marked changes in the babies' personalities. He showed eight-month-old twin boys, one of whom was arrested at the three-month level of development, while his brother made the vague, meaningless gestures of an idiot. Even more striking was a 15-month-old girl who also had failed to progress beyond the normal three-month level; she shrank back in wild-eyed withdrawal when the doctor approached her (see cut).

Checking on what became of the motherless foundlings, Dr. Spitz found that no fewer than 27 (or 30%) died in their first year of life, and 21 who survived their time in the home were already so scarred by life that they could only be classed as idiots. Unfortunately, he could get no data on the survival or emotional response of the 32 who were placed with foster parents. Those who died, said Dr. Spitz, suffered a gradual breakdown under stress, beginning with loss of appetite and sleeplessness, and ending with inability to withstand even minor ailments. Love-starved, they were crippled in the battle for life.

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