Response to Dr Flink

Dear Sirs,

Dr Flink's comments in this journal (Flink, 2001) in response to Johan Norman's article ‘The psychoanalyst and the baby: a new look at work with infants’ (2001) need a response to begin to dispel the idea in some psychoanalytic circles that infants ‘are not yet being able to understand any kind of “meaning”’. In doing so I will draw on twenty years of videotaped clinical work of the psychoanalytically oriented infant mental health clinicians at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, in order to enrich more traditional psychoanalytic thinking.

I agree with Flink's comment that, as work with the infant is usually done in the presence of the parents, there may well be a response on the part of the parents to which the infant in turn responds. However, the volume of videotaped evidence of the infant responding immediately to direct intervention by the therapist suggests that it is an infant-therapist effect rather than the therapist's intervention having an effect only after it has been processed by the mother and relayed back to the infant. Are we hanging on to our familiar theoretical models unnecessarily?

Flink's statement that the infant is not yet able to understand any kind of ‘meaning’ seems to me to be one that can only be made from outside the field. What ‘meaning’ is Flink referring to? Does his statement privilege only the meaning in language—as Cavell does—and ignore the mutually shared meaning in attunement, as well as the evidence about the nonverbal communication between mother and infant, which the neuroscientists and infant researchers take as ‘meaningful’? It ignores the view first put forward twenty-five years ago by Trevarthen (1998) of the infant's primary intersubjectivity, namely that infants are primed for intentional communication from birth. Once sequences of mother-infant interaction could be studied by video microanalysis, researchers were able to construct a complex scaffolding of correlations, and they now study complex relationa