Good Baby, Bad Baby: How the "Cry-It-Out" Method Shapes the Infant's Emotional World

Giving birth to your baby is just the beginning of a lifelong journey between you and your new bundle of joy. As you face parenthood, perhaps for the first time, you are probably feeling waves of various emotions, such as excitement, joy, awe, and nervousness, all the while wondering how to give your newborn the best care that you can. You have also likely already received tons of advice on the topic from friends, family, coworkers, the random lady at the grocery store check-out, so it's easy to get overwhelmed, especially when everybody seems to have a different way of doing things. That's where psychoanalysis comes in.

You might be thinking, "psycho-what now?", so I'll say it again: psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is the oldest form of therapy that exists, developed at the start of the 20th century largely by Sigmund Freud. If you've heard of Freud before, you probably know him as the guy that said that little boys want to have sex with their moms and kill off their dads, and that's true. Sort of. But the actual nuances of what Freud wrote and said about early childhood could be the topic for plenty of other blog articles. In this article, I'd like to show you how psychoanalytic theory isn't just for filling the pages of dusty books that sit undisturbed in the office of some eccentric psychologist with furniture that could rival the taste of Queen Victoria herself. It can actually be highly relevant to the relationship you form with your infant during the earliest period of their life.

Melanie Klein and Her Legacy

Psychoanalysis has a rich history that has evolved significantly over the past 125 years, a history that includes voices from a plethora of diverse clinicians and explorers of the human psyche. One such figure is Melanie Klein. Klein was born in 1882 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria). She grew up in a middle-class Jewish family and was the youngest of four children. Her childhood was marked by great loss, including the death of an older sister and later her father, which deeply affected her and contributed to her interest in the inner world of emotions and grief. While living in Budapest as an adult, she was analyzed by a close associate of Freud, Sándor Ferenczi, and this experience was a pivotal factor in her decision to begin working analytically with patients of her own. In 1926, she moved to London by invitation of the British Psychoanalytical Society where she further developed her pioneering theories and methods of analysis.

Klein was somewhat of a rabble-rouser and a rebel, raising the eyebrows of her mostly male colleagues as she expanded upon, and altered, the foundational tenets of orthodox analysis laid out by Freud and his followers. If you take a look at Freud's theories firsthand, you'll notice that he spent some time examining how experiences in infancy shape adult personality formation, but his crown jewel was his emphasis on what he referred to as the "Oedipal years", taking place roughly between ages 3-6. Here, he said, preschoolers go through intense emotional conflicts with implications that ripple throughout the lifespan.

Like Freud, Klein spent hours upon hours encouraging her patients to speak as freely as possible, listening to the content of their speech, and attempting to understand its deeper meaning. However, unlike Freud, Klein spent time working with actual children, and this fact likely explains why she was so intent on applying Freud's theories to the pre-Oedipal years. While she agreed with many of Freud's central tenets and beliefs, Klein was most interested in the first year of life, particularly in how infants develop a growing capacity to tolerate their emotions as they develop a relationship with their primary caregiver. In contrast to children a few years older, who have typically already developed some language and, as a result, a more cohesive sense of self, infants must navigate their internal life preverbally. Klein believed this contributed to the ways in which babies cope with their feelings, and that, without words, more primitive defense mechanisms were necessary to avoid a complete collapse in mental functioning.

The Infantile Mind from a Kleinian View

Lacking verbal speech and existing in an entirely dependent state of being, the infant, according to Klein, makes sense of their experiences through a combination of two key psychic processes, namely projection and introjection. Because a baby cannot yet conceptualize themselves as an "I" that is separate from a "you", they mix up the sources of their gratification and their deprivation. For instance, when your baby is feeling pangs of hunger and they start to cry, they not only feel the intense rage that fuels their pleas for nurturance, they also attribute this hostility to an imaginary version of you, one they believe wants to hurt them. Furthermore, if left to stew in their frustration, your baby will go on to imagine that they are attacking you and that you are attacking them. Talk about a misunderstanding!

Klein also identified another central defense mechanism that is essential for understanding infantile mental life: splitting. Do you ever notice how little children seem to be obsessed with "good guys versus bad guys"? Melanie Klein believed this phenomenon happens for an important reason and stems from the earliest moments of development. She referred to it as splitting, because, as the name suggests, babies split their feelings so that they don't feel contradictory emotional states, such as love and hatred, simultaneously. In some ways, this is helpful for your little one. It keeps things simpler and it gives them a chance to experience intense affect without becoming too overwhelmed. However, it also means they don't see you, their caregiver, as someone who mostly gives them what they need while occasionally upsetting them a time or two. Instead, when they are hungry and mad you are "bad mommy" and when they are satisfied and content you are "good mommy." With time, Klein thought that the baby integrates these separate relational dynamics into a single conceptualization of "mommy", but if too much hatred accumulates within the infant's psyche beforehand, it wreaks havoc on the process of bringing together what was previously separate.

The "Cry-It-Out" Method in Light of Klein's Theory

So, why does all of this matter? Well, I'm sure, like most parents, you would like for both you and your baby to get quality sleep as often as possible. Of course, it seems like a simple goal on the surface, but, as you're likely quick to discover, there's nothing simple about babies. One of the most controversial areas of raising infants is sleep training, a phrase that can strike panic and confusion into the hearts of many well-intentioned caregivers. If you have no such emotional reaction because the phrase is new to you, sleep training includes a structured approach that attempts to foster self-sufficiency in a baby so that they can sleep through the night without external support.

Of the many forms of sleep training that exist, the "Cry-It-Out" (CIO) method was formalized by Dr. Richard Ferber in his 1985 book "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems." While referring to his approach as "Ferberizing", the author calls for laying your baby down for sleep when they are still awake and responding to their distress only after a gradually-increasing interval of time. Depending on how it’s introduced, CIO might carry emotional risks that, from a Kleinian lens, could complicate how an infant processes distress and their early relationships.

For example, parents who are only vaguely familiar with the tenets of CIO may introduce the method abruptly, suddenly leaving their infant to cry in their crib for hours. During this state of prolonged discomfort, a baby would be vulnerable to building up elaborate fantasies of an aggressive nature and recording them as scripts for later, real-life relationships. Also, by utilizing splitting, the baby's feelings of hate and rage could become so intense that they are impossible to integrate, ultimately resulting in a lifelong tendency to see themselves and others as all-good or all-bad.

As a child therapist and a student of psychoanalytic thought, I often find myself torn. On the one hand, I understand the desperation of sleep-deprived parents. I know the allure of methods that promise rest, structure, and predictability while promoting your child's growing sense of autonomy. On the other hand, Klein’s work reminds us that infants are not blank slates — they’re feeling, fantasizing, and relating from the very beginning. Keeping both of these truths in mind, how can parents ensure everybody is getting enough rest without shaking their baby's trust in them?

Well, first and foremost, don't expect perfection from yourself or your baby. Klein's theory doesn't suggest that parents have to get it just right all of the time in order to protect their youngster from permanent psychological damage. Rather, she accepts aggression and rage as basic facts of life and encourages caregivers to try to attune themselves to their infant's needs despite the messiness of it all. This is typically much easier for a parent to do when they are well-rested themselves, so if you have a support system, don't be afraid to lean on them. Take turns with other available caregivers throughout the night to ensure your baby is tended to while you get some much-needed shuteye. Also, if you do decide to try a formal method of sleep training, take some time to research different approaches and make sure you fully understand how to implement them. Reading reputable books or articles on the subject or speaking to your pediatrician are great strategies for ensuring success.

Some Final Thoughts to Sleep On

I don't claim to have all of the answers, either to sleep training or parenting in general, and I'm the first to admit that all families are different. One of the beauties of psychoanalysis is its inherent appreciation of complexity, so don't take my word as the final truth on any of these matters. Instead, I encourage parents to look deeper at their everyday experiences with their babies. While sleep training might merely seem like an effective method for getting your newborn to remain asleep throughout the night, it could also be teaching them how to make sense of comfort, frustration, and the people they depend on.