The origins of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder a

THE ORIGINS OF NARCISSISM 65
a decisive biobehavioral shift at age 2 months. The social smile is a
well-known indicator of this shift.
To cite an example with particular reference for self-other differentiation,
a process crucial to a critique of primary narcissism, infants
3 months old can distinguish among constant, fixed-ratio, and variable
reinforcement schedules (Watson, 1979, 1985). Thus, they can differentiate
self-initiated actions, some of which have a 100% probability
of success and are therefore on a constant reinforcement schedule, from
other-initiated activities, most of which are reinforcing on only a variable
or probabilistic basis. The ability to distinguish among these contingencies
is but one of the ways in which the infant comes to extract
the invariant of agency. Stern (1985) provides heuristic empirical evidence
for each of the remaining three invariants. Of these, self-affectivity
is especially important because affect forms the core of the preverbal
or prereflective self (Emde, 1983), is an amplifier of drives
(Tomkins, 1962, 1963), and, given the universality of affective facial
display (Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1972; Izard, 1971), is a primary
medium of parent-infant communication during this preverbal period.
Affects form one of the self-invariants because the infant learns to
correlate an emotion exhibited as a discrete facial display with an emotion
constituted as a specific pattern of autonomic neural firing with a
concomitant experiential tone (Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983).
Parent-Infant Communication
Early communicative processes. Presymbolic representational capacities
underlie not only the process of self-other differentiation but
also the increasingly sophisticated communications within the infantcaregiver
system of mutual regulation. Communication between infant
and parent is a highly complex affair that requires the infant to perceive
changes in the parent’s behavior and affect in a fraction of a second
(Beebe, 1982; Beebe, Jaffe, Feldstein, Mays, & Alson, 1985; Beebe &
Stern, 1977; Gianino & Tronick, 1988; Stern, 1971; Tronick, 1989). A
3-month-old infant, for example, when confronted with an image of
mother’s face speaking, but with her voice delayed by approximately
0.5 second, will perceive the discrepancy between visual and auditory
modalities and will be disturbed by it (Dodd, 1979). Mother-infant
communication during the preverbal period requires that the infant be
sensitive enough to discover even small temporal discrepancies.