What was going on when I was born?

The police said yesterday that they still had no clues to the identity or motivations of the vandals who broke the display windows of 13 shops in a predominantly Hasidic section of Brooklyn last weekend. The windows, which were broken on the Jewish sabbath, were being replaced yesterday, and business appeared normal at the shops - between 45th and 53d Streets on 13th Avenue, the Borough Park section's main commercial street. As merchants cleaned broken glass from sidewalks and shops, many said they were troubled by what happened on 13th Avenue, whose one- and two-story buildings house many restaurants, jewelry stores, electronic shops and bakeries, most of which are owned by Jews.

The Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service said today that he expected disciplinary action to be taken against two Border Patrol agents who forcibly returned a Soviet seaman to his ship last month. ''There obviously were mistakes made,'' the Commissioner, Alan C. Nelson, said in an interview. , He said the agents erred in ''not following the guidelines'' after the sailor, Miroslav Medved, who is a Ukrainian, jumped from a freighter into the Mississippi River near New Orleans. Mr. Nelson said the agency had submitted a report to the Justice Department detailing the mistakes made by the two agents, who have not been publicly identified. The report, which runs to more than 100 pages, says that the agents acted hastily and violated agency regulations by returning Mr. Medved to the Soviet freighter without consulting their supervisors, according to Reagan Administration officials.

THE Great Red Spot of Jupiter is yielding its mystery to a new approach by physicists and meteorologists. Gone now are the volcano theory, the egg theory, the planetoid theory, the column-of-gas theory and the hurricane theory. Scientists have concluded that the Red Spot is a gigantic eddy of swirling gas, driven by the planet's turbulent winds and apparently capable of keeping its shape as long as the planet keeps spinning. The Red Spot, a cosmic landmark since the first telescopes revealed it 300 years ago, has baffled generations of scientists by standing mostly in place and by refusing to disappear. Specialists in the study of dynamical systems, or ''chaos,'' now believe that their findings will help them understand how order can emerge spontaneously from natural chaos, an understanding that may help penetrate the complex patterns of weather on earth.

International Soviet negotiators continue to insist on a ban on scientific research into space-based defense weapons, even though Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, seemed to hint publicly two months ago that such research might be allowed, according to a senior Reagan Administration official. [Page A1, Column 6.] Moscow's press nearly ignored the war in Afghanistan in its first years, but Soviet newspapers now regularly carry reports about young Soviet heroes killed in battle, and Soviet television is now showing combat scenes. After almost six years of combat involving hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers and thousands of Soviet casualties, the Kremlin cannot pretend that only a few Russian soldiers are in Afghanistan temporarily to help out. [A1:5-6.]

A report in the Art People column in Weekend on Friday about a suit involving a 1981 auction of Impressionist paintings at Christie's misidentified a lawyer, Robert Weiner. He represents Cristallina S.A., the company that consigned the paintings to Christie's.

The stock market yesterday recorded its best one-day gain in 10 months as investors bought up shares, drawing confidence from lower interest rates. Most major indicators advanced sharply into record territory. Detractors of Wall Street's recent rally apparently conceded defeat, and the result was the best advance in blue-chip issues since Jan. 21 and a startling jump by broader market indexes. The Dow Jones industrial average soared 27.52 points, to a record 1,431.88, despite the absence of many large investors because of the Veterans Day holiday. The average, which crossed the 1,400 mark for the first time last Wednesday, has set a record in six of the last nine sessions. More than half of its gain yesterday came in the final hour as investors engaged in what traders described as frenzied activity.

The corporate jet that collided with a small plane over New Jersey Sunday was on an ''unusual, nonstandard'' course for its intended landing at Teterboro Airport, an official close to an investigation of the crash said yesterday. A more usual course for a landing approach, the official said, would have put the plane, a Falcon 50 Executive Jet, two miles west of the spot where it and a single-engine Piper Cherokee collided and plunged in flames into Fairview and Cliffside Park, small communities across the Hudson River from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The crash killed six people, one of them on the ground. It was unclear whether the jet's unusual route was taken at the direction of the Teterboro control tower. Asked at a news conference last night if the jet was ''too far east,'' James E. Burnett Jr., the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said he did not know because he had not studied the plane's radar track. A Visual Sighting The official who told of the unusual course, speaking on the condition that he not be named, also suggested that the jet's pilot, in reporting a visual sighting of the Cherokee to the Teterboro tower just before the crash, might have seen a third aircraft that he mistook for the small plane, or else may have lost sight of the plane.

NEWLY revealed documents provide richer detail than has been known before about Sigmund Freud's own thinking and activities as a therapist. Such documents are considered crucial to a better understanding of how psychoanalysis evolved. Among several sets of documents currently being prepared by scholars for publication are the journals of Princess Marie Bonaparte, who Freud treated in 1924 before she became a psychoanalyst herself. Portions of the journals, made available to The New York Times, show Freud, who by then was in his 70's, using methods that by today's psychoanalytic standards would be considered quite unorthodox, freely offering his opinions on music, art and literature, confessing that his own self-analysis was never completed, and confiding to his patient interpretations of his own dreams. All that suggests that the master allowed himself to be freer in his technique than he allowed his disciples to be. ''The journals give an unusually candid view of Freud as a working therapist,'' said Frank Hartman, the psychoanalyst who is editing them. Dr. Hartman received permission to publish the journals from the Princess' daughter, Eugenie of Greece.

Scientists from the Johns Hopkins Medical School reported today that a person who drinks five or more cups of coffee a day is almost three times as likely to develop heart problems as a person who drinks no coffee at all. The scientists said that a long-term study of more than 1,000 graduating medical students, followed for up to 38 years, found that 51 have so far either died suddenly of heart failure or suffered heart attacks or severe heart pain. Those who drank five or more cups of coffee per day had a 2.8 times greater risk of having the heart problems than those who drank no coffee. Dr. Thomas A. Pearson, a co-author of the report, called the findings ''preliminary'' but suggested that an individual who has taken the standard steps to avoid heart disease, such as quitting smoking and having blood pressure and cholesterol levels checked, might additionally want to limit coffee consumption to two cups a day as part of ''a prudent life style.''

Once upon a time, beautiful young princesses wore golden crowns and talked of such things as lumpy mattresses, evil magicians and impudent swineherds wanting to steal kisses. But times have changed, and Britain's thoroughly modern Princess wears designer hats shaped like flying saucers and talks of more current concerns. Her Favorite Color The Princess of Wales discussed makeup tips and drug problems with Nancy Reagan. She told the wives of J. C. Penney executives that her favorite color was royal blue and that she had had such a good time at the White House ball Saturday night that she was ready to start spinning again, right in the juniors' department. ''I'm very up for dancing now,'' she murmured, in the middle of a staid tour of the suburban Virginia store this morning. And she confided to Clint Eastwood, one of her partners at the White House, how wonderful - and rare - it was to dance with a man taller than she.

A caption in Metropolitan Report on Friday with a drawing depicting the ''pizza connection'' trial misidentified the judge. He is Pierre N. Leval.

The 70-year-old Walden School, which says its existence depends on building condominiums above its building on Central Park West, is embroiled in a bitter dispute with neighbors who oppose the development plans. Community groups say that a proposed condominium tower should not be built on top of one of the avenue's finest neo-classical buildings, and some nearby residents say the tower would block their views of the park and lower the value of their apartments. The school won the latest legal skirmish, in August, when the State Supreme Court in Manhattan refused to halt the project. But with opponents, who have delayed the project by a year, planning to appeal, the two sides appear to be headed for a long battle in which technical zoning issues may decide the larger issues of a school's survival and of architectural preservation.