Infant Research and Adult Treatment: Co-Constructing Interactions, by Beatrice Beebe and Frank M. Lachman,  The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ, 2002,  272 pp., $39.95

This is a wonderful book. For anyone interested in new ways of conceptualizing the efficacy of the psychoanalytic process based on validated research, it should be a “must read.” Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachman share the outcome of 30 years of collaboration focused on bringing the understandings generated from infant research on the quest to understand the therapeutic action of psychoanalytic treatment. They do so in a very personal and conversational style that seems to invite the reader into an intimate seminar on the history and outcome of their work together, from their initial meeting as trainee and supervisor to their current collaboration as equally recognized experts in their respective fields. Beatrice Beebe has been involved in infant research, especially that involving second-by-second analysis of face-to-face interactions between mothers and infants, from her graduate work in the ‘70s with Daniel Stern, a pioneer in the field. Frank Lachman has been exploring alternatives to the ego psychology he has taught in his classical analytic training in the early ‘60s because of its limitations in helping him to understand and work effectively with the more disturbed analytic patients he chose to treat. In 1973, Lachman supervised a group of three psychology graduate students at a college mental health clinic on cases each had in treatment. Beebe had been assigned a fairly disturbed college sophomore whom she chose to treat analytically because of her interest in the origins of self-and object-representations. This resonated with Lachman, and he took a special interest in helping her with the kind of case he had been learning to work with. Beebe continued in supervision with Lachman for the eight years she treated this young man, whom she called Burton, and the formulation of his successful analysis became the focus of their first jointly authored paper in 1983. The book begins with a case presentation of Burton, followed by a comparison of how they formulated t