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This selection of collected papers by Louis Sander, compiled as an edited volume by Amadei and Bianchi, forms an important book for anyone interested in the relevance of infant research and dynamic systems theory to the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. With his work over nearly four decades, Louis Sander, child psychiatrist, infant researcher and psychoanalyst, has profoundly influenced the direction of American theorists and clinicians working at the interface between infant research and psychoanalysis. His systems views can be felt in the work of T. Berry Brazelton, James Herzog, Alexandra Harrison, Gerald Stechler, Edward Tronick, Karlen Lyons-Ruth, Evelyn Schwaber, Arnold Modell, Steve Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, Beatrice Beebe, Frank Lachmann, Jeremy Nahum and Daniel Stern. Sander's thinking has been pivotal to the theory development of the Boston Change Process Group of which he is a member, and the now well-known concept ‘moments of meeting’ can be attributed to him.
As a developmental researcher, Sander early on shifted the focus from studying the infant as an individual organism to studying the infant in the context of the interactional relationship with the mother and their shared surround. Beatrice Beebe states:
In his systems views, Sander emphasizes the primacy of process over more static notions of structure. He recommends that we shift our conventional view of psychological organization as the property of the individual (such as an infant), to a
Page 724view of psychological organization as the property of the mutually organized system (such as mother and infant).
This idea may now seem obvious but his fundamental understandings such as that noted above have challenged many previously held developmental beliefs. Sander began his career working on the 1954 Boston University Pavenstedt longitudinal study in early child development looking at seven tasks of maternal-child ‘fit’ over the first three years of life with consideration to organization