In an exceedingly effective way, this long awaited collaboration of two world-renowned professionals, pediatrician and psychoanalyst, brings us to a working comprehension of the process by which a psychological organization in human life is constructed. It is not a book written for psychoanalysts, but it is one in which a ground plan of psychoanalytic thinking weaves together the fundamentals of new and recent empirical research in earliest infancy with that in the early infant caregiver interactional process, and both with the realm of the inner experience of mothers, fathers, and infants gleaned over decades of clinical experience.

Because it is written in an easy, nontechnical, almost conversational style, the wealth of information and clinical expertise the book contains becomes readily useful for new and expectant parents as well