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IN DISCRIMINATING LEVELS OF INFANT-CAREGIVER INTERACTION FROM a Developmental, Individual-Difference, Relationship-Based (DIR) viewpoint, Stanley Greenspan does an excellent and provocative job of casting light on a critical concept in the field of infant development, specifically that of internal representational experience. DIR has evolved into an encompassing biopsychosocial theoretical model, sharing innumerable resonances with other current models, but maintaining a coherence of its own.
As Greenspan notes, and as his accompanying paper (and our response to it) reflect, the model pertains to a wide variety of infant, child, adolescent, and adult psychopathological presentations. In light of the particular importance of DIR as a dynamically informed approach to autism spectrum disorders, the current paper especially addresses implications bearing upon this special population.
There has been a proliferation of highly respectable books and articles addressing the development of the baby through the lens of the child on the autistic spectrum. Carrying on a noble tradition that spans back to the time of Freud, and other early psychoanalysts who looked into the memories of adult analytic patients, gleaning schisms in the parent-child dyad, we are now able to look first-hand at the infant-parent dyads that have failed to achieve adequate attunement so that we are best able to create our theories of what can interfere with healthy emotional development. While there is no doubt that researchers such as Beebe and others have shown us all that can be gained from a close microanalysis of the infant-mother interaction, and what mothers can learn from this video feedback, researchers and therapists have to be careful to remember that in the eyes of a beleaguered, sleep-deprived mother of a child with special needs, mothers are still left to feel that if