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Why would an academic, psychoanalytic journal publish a book review of a picture book? This review enthusiastically, and excitedly answers that question. The volume under consideration is The Mother-Infant Interaction Picture Book: Origins of Attachment written by Beatrice Beebe, Phyllis Cohen and Frank Lachmann with illustrations by Dillon Yothers.
Can psychoanalysts make use of this informative, detailed, and beautifully illustrated, exciting, yes exciting, “picture book”?
Can this “picture book” be helpful in clinical work? Can it expand and further our understandings of the bi-directional, moment-by-moment interaction between patient and therapist?
Does this work add depth to our understandings of the therapeutic process, zeroing in on the self-regulatory capacities and the self with other regulatory capacities across verbal and nonverbal dimensions of the treatment process?
Finally, but of vital importance; Can understanding the details of the earliest moments of infant–caregiver communications—those patterns of early action sequences—the foundations of our relational expectations and resulting predictions of our experiences-really inform our grasp of the developmental process as it affects attachment, on-going relatedness, affect regulation and more?
The answer is: Yes. A resounding yes.
The Mother-Infant Interaction Picture Book details and illustrates patterns of mother-infant communication. These patterns are explicated and understood by way of a frame-by-frame examination of mother-infant action-dialogues. The outsized nature of this volume allows for illustrated mother-infant action sequences to be examined and understood, as if they are viewed through the freeze frame, split screen, moment by moment interaction. While the illustrations have been disguised to ensure the confidentiality of the families, the essential features of gaze, head orientation, facial expression, and hand positioning have been preserved. For those unfamiliar with the research technique o