The origins of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder a

64 JOHN S. AUERBACH
tzoff & Borton, 1979), for example, infants identified visually a nipple
they had sucked while blindfolded and differentiated it from another
nipple, with which they had had no experience, provided as a distractor.
Infants at this age can also correlate light intensity with sound
intensity (Lewkowicz& Turkewitz, 1980). In fact, the capacity for crossmodal
equivalence in infants is so sophisticated that 3-week-olds can
imitate the tongue and mouth movements of adult models (Meltzoff
& Moore, 1977) and 2-day-olds can imitate an adult’s affective facial
expressions (Field, Woodson, Greenberg, & Cohen, 1982). While these
imitations are not the same as the intentional imitations described by
Piaget (1945/1962), they nevertheless indicate that infants can correlate
body transformations that they can see with body transformations
that they cannot see but can perceive through proprioception.
Neonatal infants also have striking memorial capacities. For example,
neonates who were exposed during the last trimester of pregnancy to
their mothers’ reading a passage from Dr. Seuss not surprisingly preferred
hearing their mothers’ voices, rather than those of other adult
women (see DeCasper & Fifer, 1980), but also preferred listening to
their mothers read the material they had heard in utero over hearing
their mothers read a different passage (DeCasper & Spence, 1986). In
a cued-recall study (Greco, Rovee-Collier, Hayne, Griesler, & Earley,
1986), infants less than 3 months old demonstrated an ability to remember
contingencies between their body movements and the movements
of a mobile they had kicked some 1 to 3 weeks after the initial
exposure. Infants less than 2 months old can remember specific objects
in a training mobile for up to 24 hours (Hayne, Greco, Earley, Griesler,
& Rovee-Collier, 1986). These remarkable perceptual and memorial
capacities suggest that infants in the first 2 months of life have a presymbolic
representational capacity founded on the storage of distinctive
features of stimuli (Beebe & Lachmann, 1988; Meltzoff, 1985; Stern,
1985).
Formation of a core self. Between the second and sixth months
of life, according to Stern (1985), infants use these early cognitive
abilities to extract from their daily experiences a set of self-invariantsthat
is, construct a core self. These invariants are agency, self-coherence,
self-affectivity, and self-history (memory). Numerous other infancy
researchers (e.g., Emde, Gaensbauer, & Harmon, 1976; Piaget,
1936/1963; Sander, 1962; Spitz, 1965) have noted that infants undergo