Many a psychoanalyst has wondered aloud: infancy research is very interesting, but what does it have to do with psychoanalysis, and of what benefit is its study to the practising psychoanalyst? Beebe and Lachmann's book should put this notion by sceptics and doubters to rest.

The relationship between the two fields has indeed been a curious one, although two of the towering figures in developmental research, Louis Sander and Daniel Stern, are both psychoanalysts. Moreover, psychoanalysis has always thought of itself as a ‘developmental’ psychology: indeed, one would be hard pressed to find any psychoanalytic theorist's work that did not have either explicit or implicit developmental assumptions. Why then, should psychoanalysts not be interested in the empirical research of developmentalists, much of whose work deals with issues we have always considered salient? Happily, relations between the two disciplines continue to evolve in a constructive direction.