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This book is the record of a debate between Daniel Stern and André Green about the value of Stern's kind of infant observation and research to psychoanalysis. The book gives the impression of two giants fighting each other with considerable gusto while a number of other interlocutors suggest compromise positions in which neither is particularly interested.
Fundamentally Stern's argument is that psychoanalysis can benefit from taking note of the findings of research on infants. He has devoted his life to charting the detailed interactions between infant and mother from the earliest years onwards and developed a body of theory rooted in those observations. One key element in his work was the finding that from the very earliest moments babies behave as though they had an ego, were relating entities. This result challenged Freud's notion of primary narcissism. Another element, not reported in this volume, but which appears in Stern's work on mothers is the idea that motherhood is a genuinely new psychic constellation appearing in the psyche, influenced by, but not determined by early experiences of having been mothered.
For Green the reality of intrapsychic life makes any form of observational study impossible or at least impossibly naïve. Only the ‘psychoanalytic attitude’ in the clinical situation can reveal the facts of intrapsychic life. He strengthens his argument by using Freud's concept of ‘Nachtraglichkeit’. This is the idea that we revise our conceptualization of events in the light of later experience. For Green this means that any notion of the ‘now’ as relevant to psychoanalysis is instantly destroyed, corroded if you like, by our post hoc reconstructions. (Ironically, given Green's view of research, this radical notion is reproduced on a much smaller scale in brain research where we can show that incoming information is revised to take account of later data before a percept reaches consciousness.)
Although the debate is at times at a rarefied level, often i