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For many analysts who are not engaged in early developmental research, this remarkable little book will come as a delightful surprise. The First Relationship has made its way almost unnoticed onto the reserve shelves of our institute libraries, university bookstores, and our candidates' backpacks. Stern's widest audience, in fact, probably lies among both students and teachers of psychoanalysis and analysts of all ages who are interested in analytic theory and the current state of infant observation. His fellow researchers in the field will already be familiar with his many papers over the past decade, and the book is not intended, as he himself states, to be a popular guide to child upbringing, another "how to" book. Neither is it a highly technical research monograph, full of tables and reaction times, suitable only for specialists, although Stern is a leader in the use of advanced technical methods of observation, based on filmed observations, freeze-frame analyses of expressive movements, and measurements in milliseconds.
What Stern has accomplished with remarkable skill is a weaving together of his findings on early mother-infant interactions into a lively narrative account of the first year of life, from the first expressive repertories of mutual response, still describable in terms derived from animal behavior, to the "interpersonal experience of being with the other person" that can be called a human relationship. This process from an undifferentiated but "preadapted" phase of ego development to a phase of object constancy, from interacting infant-mother behaviors to the infant's acquisition of an inner representation of the mother distinct from all others, occupies the period from birth to the ninth or tenth month. But Stern's freshest and most surprising observations come from the third to the sixth month, and his focus, unlike that of others who have studied feeding, sleep rhythms, or other aspects of infant care, is centered on those intervals of pl