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Having a compilation of papers between two covers allows for an appreciation of the scope and breadth of infant researcher and psychologist Ed Tronick's body of work organized here into five parts which include ‘Neurobehavior’, ‘Culture’, ‘Infant Social-Emotional Interaction’, ‘Perturbations: Natural and Experimental’ and finally, ‘Dyadic Expansion of Consciousness and Meaning Making’. His earliest paper, presented here as Chapter 28, ‘Infant responses to impending collision: Optical and real’, published in 1971, falls into the more experimental category of his infant research, while the most recent paper, in collaboration with Alexandra Harrison, is Chapter 36, ‘Contributions to understanding theraputic change: Now we have a playground’. This paper focuses on clinical applications of his dyadic expansion of consciousness model as a means to understand changein the videotaped psychoanalytic psychotherapy sessionof analmost three year old child who witnessed the World Trade Center attacks in the absence of her mother. The microprocessing of videotapes of mother/baby interactions and/or of psychotherapeutic sessions has been a fundamental tool for Tronick's research and theory building.
Ed Tronick includes in this volume a tribute to Louis Sander in Chapter 33, ‘A Model of Infant Mood States and Sanderian Affective Waves’, originally published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues (2002, pp. 73-99) as one of six papers by authors influenced by Sander's pioneering work as a psychoanalyst and infant researcher. Tronick, along with researcher analysts such as Beatrice Beebe, Daniel Stern and others, credit Sander's early research, understood through the lens of dynamic systems theory, as bedrock for their own evolving appreciation of mother/infant and therapist/patient dyads as mutually regulating interactive systems which move toward complexity and coherence.
Tronick, along with Sander, Harrison, Lyons-Ruth, Morgan, Nahum and Brushweller-Stern, have been members of the Boston Proce