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This is a book on early attachment which examines both sides of the relationship, looking at what parents contribute in terms of their personal histories and expectations of parenthood, as well as what babies bring with them in terms of their responsiveness and adaptability. Hence there is a potentially fruitful collaboration between Berry Brazelton, renowned for his research on early infant development, and Bertrand Cramer, a psychoanalyst specialising in parent/infant relationships. Brazelton's work is already well documented and resumed here in the main part of the book. He describes his observations on the range of babies' reflexive behaviours, showing how complex and rapid are their adaptations to the environment in which they emerge. He is especially interested in the vast differences in reactivity and behavioural organisation between babies, which means that each baby has to be adjusted to in a different way by parents and professional carers, defying ready-made ‘formulae’ approaches to infant care. Despite the availability of this research, much medical discourse offered to parents during the early days of their relationship with their babies still seems to focus on ‘The Baby’ as a single individual, as if miraculously cloned at each birth. There is still little attention paid to discovering the individual differences in the feeding, sleeping and arousal patterns of young babies, and much damage is done to mothers' intuitive responses to their babies by standardised advice-giving.
Brazelton's work is therefore vastly important and made even more relevant when seen in the context of the parental part of the relationship. Bertrand Cramer contributes some well-chosen descriptions of the psychodynamic processes involved in both the desire for a child and accompanying a pregnancy. He writes briefly about the differences during pregnancy between mothers' and fathers' emotional attachment to the future child, and argues consistently for the increased participation o