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When Leo Stone composed his now classic paper, ‘The widening scope of indications for psychoanalysis’ in 1954, it is not likely that he thought of infants or infant-parent pairs as potential subjects. At that time, even child analysts assumed some capacity for verbal communication as an essential prerequisite for the clinical (rather than preventive) application of psychoanalytic methods. It was the pioneering work of René Spitz, John Bowlby, Margaret Mahler and above all Selma Fraiberg that provided the groundwork for the evolution of a field of infant psychiatry, now a burgeoning sub-speciality that has come to embrace a wide range of professional disciplines and theoretical perspectives.
Among the psychoanalytic contributors to this field, none has been more active than Daniel Stern. His earlier books, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985) and Diary of a Baby (1990) have brought the field and its empirical findings to a large popular and pro-