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Biomedical subjects

J B McDevitt

Publications and source records attributed to J B McDevitt.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1997

The continuity of conflict and compromise formation from infancy to adulthood: a twenty-five-year follow-up study.

This paper reports on one of fifteen subjects from the Mahler separation-individualization project who have participated in a twenty-five-year follow-up study. The focus is on the beginning transfer of interpersonal conflict to intrapsychic conflict and compromise formation early in the second year of life, and on the course and persistence of these into adulthood. Conflict and compromise, along with constitutional and environmental factors, were major determinants of the subject's personality and a major source of continuity in personality development from one-and-a-half to twenty-five years of age.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

A childhood gender identity disorder. Analysis, preoedipal determinants, and therapy in adolescence.

This paper is about a four-year-old boy's wish to be a girl. This wish was a compromise formation, the consequence of intrapsychic conflict. Using reconstructive inferences and research findings, I suggest a line of development in the boy's femininity, beginning with constitutional and maturational factors, with being shaped in a feminine direction by his environment, and with shaping himself internally in the form of a compromise formation in that direction by the time he was two to three years of age. The disorder began to acquire a persistence and stability during the preoedipal phase and, with minor changes in its components, remained operative during the oedipal phase, latency, and adolescence.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1982

Thoughts on the emergence of the sense of self, with particular emphasis on the body self.

In trying to trace the emergence of the sense of self during the first fifteen months of life--in particular the formation of the bodily self--we used, on the one hand, severe dissociations of the integral parts of the body self such as occurs in psychosis, in the Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, and in phantom-limb disturbances and, on the other hand, data from our normative study of the separation-individuation process as inferred from mother-infant interaction in general and the infant's behavior in front of the mirror in particular. The infant's behavior in front of the mirror strongly suggests that feelings about himself only gradually become integrated with perceptual and cognitive awareness of himself. All the data, furthermore, indicate that it is not possible to study the development of the self separate from the development of the object. All inferences contained in our paper about the emergence of the sense of self were made from the point of view of the central organizing, integrating, and synthesizing institution of the mind, that is, the ego. We agree with other authors that the developing self has both experiential and structural aspects. We titled our paper "Thoughts on the Emergence of the Sense of Self" to indicate that this paper is meant to be an initial and quite tentative communication about the vast and elusive area of personality development concerning the emergence of our bodily self, and thus of the core of our personal identity.

Body Image↗