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Owing to the efforts of infant researchers over the last several decades, we have been learning a lot about the ways in which babies develop from birth through early childhood. A vast amount of information is taken in and processed long before the acquisition of language is apparent. Much of what has been learned from the empirical studies of babies has forced psychoanalysts to revise their developmental theories. For example, Daniel Stern's work on the origins of the sense of self (1985) enabled him and his coworkers to reject Mahler's developmental schema, with its notion of an early autistic stage. Analysts who were reared on this developmental model had to revise their ideas about when infants begin to experience their own subjectivity, as well as when they are capable of interacting with their environment, human and otherwise-far earlier, it turns out, than had been imagined. Infant Research and Adult Treatment: Co-constructing Interactions likewise contributes greatly to our understanding of how infants interact with their caretakers. In addition, the authors ambitiously invite us to rethink some of our assumptions about what it is we do with our patients that leads to change. It seems to me they succeed admirably.
Beatrice Beebe, the reader is informed, began her infant research career working with Stern and has used close examination of the face-to-face interaction of mother and infant to measure the subtle bi-directional influences that occur in the dyad. The authors review a large body of research, including their own, to demonstrate the idea that infants are continually engaged in the internalization of stimuli from the inanimate environment and from their caregivers, which they internalize in ways that modify their self-regulating processes. Simultaneously, the infant is also engaged in constant interactive regulatory processes that in turn have an impact on the interaction with the caregiver and on the caregiver's self-regulation. The authors make clear