Discussion

I HAVE BEEN FOLLOWING DANIEL STERN'S research for many years with interest and admiration. Even now, though I have serious reservations concerning his interpretations of that research, I still agree with Gifford's (1986) review of Stern's first book, The First Relationship(1977), "This book not only holds its own in the great descriptive tradition of Spitz, Escalona, Wolff, and other gifted observers of the newborn, but its warm, contagious style conveys some of the exhilaration—that delight in seeing familiar phenomena in a new way—we encountered on first reading Spitz's early papers" (p. 226).

Gifford goes on to observe that Stern was dealing lightly with the contrast between his observations and traditional psychoanalytic views of infancy, "even treating Freud's original intuitions with sympathy and respect," and allowing for reconciliations between certain old views of infancy and certain new ones (p. 226).

In contrast, Stern's latest volume, The Interpersonal World of the Infant(1985), leaves very little room for negotiation between the old and the new. Now Stern has it that his studies of infant development will revolutionize psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. And, judging from the endorsements on the book jacket, very few psychoanalysts, impressed as they are with anyone who is engaged in "hard" research, are willing to point out the flaws in Stern's interpretation of his data or his questionable grasp of traditional psychoanalytic theory.

The liveliness of Stern's personality and manner of presentation, welcome as they might be in a general atmosphere of stifling orthodoxy, should not be confused with the long-range relevance of his ideas. It is one thing to appreciate the value of Stern's research data and his inventive research methodology and quite another to accept Stern's unverified hypotheses on the emergence of the self as a replacement for the psychoanalytic model of the infant mind.