You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Infants are born with limited capacity for autoregulation and rely on the primary caregiver to modulate their affective states. This interpersonal regulatory process depends on the maternal capacity to correctly interpret the infant's cues. The process of interpreting the infant's cues involves, among other things, the attribution of intentions to the baby and depends on appropriate levels of maternal preoccupation (Winnicott 1960), emotional containment (Bion 1959), empathy, and reflective function (Fonagy 1995). Our research emphasizes how the creation of internal meaning is influenced and shaped from an early age by this emotional relationship with the primary caregivers through the mechanisms of projection, introjection, and projective identification. These interpersonal and intrapsychic mechanisms play a universal role in perception and behavior, which can be observed in a developmental continuum from adaptive forms of empathy to pathological levels of delusion (Zinner and de Castro 2006). Although a considerable amount of work has been done both on the clinical aspects of projection and projective identification and on the regulatory mechanisms taking place in the early mother-baby relationship (Lieberman 1999; Seligman 1999; Silverman and Lieberman 1999; Alvarez 1999; Grotstein 1999), as well as in the family as a whole, there is little empirical work and systematic research evidence on the rather complex dynamic mechanisms involved in the failure of these processes. In our research we suggest that early maternal projections can be empirically investigated by measuring the positive (adaptive) and/or negative (pathological) attributions of intentionality to the baby.