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If psychodynamic therapy is conceived as the application of what we have learned from developmental psychology then this book is a must for all practitioners. The authors, both of whom are psychoanalysts and academic researchers, have developed a substantial reputation over the years for their micro-process analyses of face-to-face interactions between mothers and infants and its implications for adult psychotherapeutic practice.
Essentially, this is a study of how communication patterns in early infancy lay the foundations of attachment security. At the heart of the book is a research study involving eighty-four first-time mothers and their babies, which compared a detailed analysis of two-and-a-half minutes of interaction in these dyads when the infants were four months old with their attachment status at a year. They found that these early interactions predicted attachment security, a truly remarkable finding given that infant attachment security predicts adult attachment security. That an analysis of two-and-a-half minutes interaction between mother and infant can generate data of profound relevance to patterns of intimacy in later life is extraordinary. That it can suggest pathways for developing psychotherapeutic practice is exciting. What is also remarkable, and rather discouraging, is that this low risk sample of ethnically diverse, highly educated women, produced, in attachment terms, a high risk sample of infants (19% were classified as resistant, and 20% as disorganised, at one year, above the usual insecure distribution for a community sample).
But it is the process by which these results were achieved that is likely to be of most interest to clinicians. Departing from the unilinear notion that maternal sensitivity makes for good infant development the authors focus on how the “self contingencies” of each partner in the relationship (their sense of being in tune with themselves) combines with their “interactive contingency” (their sense of being in tune wi