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This book engages the reader from the beginning, with a description of an analysis conducted by Beatrice Beebe some ten years ago under the supervision of Frank Lachmann,
giving their understanding of the patient from a psychoanalytic perspective. The authors then loop back to infant research and forward again in order to look at the same case with hindsight through the perspective of the interactive process arising in the mother-infant dyad. Having set the scene, they proceed to draw out a number of themes from the findings of infant research and to develop these themes very fully, before questioning and finally applying them in the analyst-patient dyad.
The central theme of the book is the nature of the interactive process that takes place between mother and infant, or between analyst and patient, and the way in which the interaction between, and the self-regulation within, the two partners proceed hand in hand and shape one another. The emphasis is primarily on non-verbal aspects of communication.
After some initial reservations that the more cognitive language of infant research, as opposed to that of infant observation, was placing an unduly restrictive framework on the field of psychoanalytic ideas; and that a number of the views being put forward were already well established and developed, by Daniel Stern for example with whom Beatrice Beebe studied, I began to appreciate that this book contains very little that is redundant and is packed with ideas that are not only relevant but also challenging. My interest quickened, and finally I came round to the belief that this is a groundbreaking work that proposes a major shift in the way we view ourselves in the consulting room.
Briefly, the book starts by describing a dyadic systems view, according to which both the internal processes within, and the interactive processes between, the two partners of a dyad are continually affecting one another and are being organized concurrently. Thus, self-regulation and interac