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Louis Sander's article is the centerpiece of a symposium on infant research and its relevance to adult psychoanalytic treatment. It is commented upon by psychoanalysts Stephen Seligman, Jessica Benjamin, Arnold Modell and the late Stephen Mitchell. All attest to the importance of Sander's infant research, spanning five decades, intended to
help us understand the biological, neuropsychological, and developmental processes which emerge during the first year of life, and which have a significant impact upon later development. In addition Sander theorizes that the study of infancy can help to better understand the complexities of the analytic process which are common to all theoretical orientations. In this respect, while he was trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst, Sander's work does not draw upon either Freudian or Kleinian theory, but rather on the systems theory of Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, complexity and chaos theory, the developmental psychology of Vygotsky, and the study of biological processes in the neonate.
Sander's work will be of interest to Jungians, as he emphasizes that the major motivating force within the individual is a striving towards wholeness and coherence, and talks about the brain as having a meaning-making function. This striving towards wholeness and the quest for meaning occurs through innate (archetypal) processes of self-organization and self-regulation. The brain is constantly trying to ‘put it all together’. According to Sander the initiation of these self-organizing and self-regulating processes occurs through the infant's contact with the ‘(m)other’ through shared states of recognition and awareness. The ever-developing brain, through the infant's experiential engagement with its world as a self-initiating agent, creates new meanings and is able to achieve new levels of organization and integration. From my own experience utilizing the Tavistock method of infant observation, I would call these states ‘moments of being’, a metaphor which wa