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The two authors of this book, Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann, have 30 years of experience each in integrating the findings of infant research with those of psychoanalysis, and they present their findings here. Infant Research and Adult Treatment addresses only one aspect of the infant world, that of face-to-face interactions, with the explanation that this describes “the origin of relatedness and patterns of nonverbal communication that continue to operate in similar form across the life span.” They also show that “what is new in contemporary psychoanalytic view is the increasing centrality of the interactive process itself.”
The authors discuss a vignette from a very difficult case, Burton, which both of them followed for years and through which they were able to examine the evolution of their own thinking over the last 3 decades. The dyadic systems approach to interaction that underlies their current psychoanalytic work grew out of this study. Beebe and Lachmann have used infant research to conceptualize the non-verbal and implicit interactive process itself within psychoanalysis. They understand it as proceeding in parallel with the explicit verbal and symbolic narrative. The authors integrate perceptual and cognitive research with descriptions of early interactive patterns; this forms the basis of their views of the origins of self and object representations. The dyadic