The Effect of the Infant on its Caregiver. The Origin of Behavior Series, Volume I: Edited by Michael Lewis and Leonard A. Rosenblum. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1974. 264 pp.

This book will offer little of value either to the serious student or to the sophisticated reader interested in any aspect of the infant-caretaker relationship. From the title, the reader expects to find meaningful data which would add to our understanding of the earliest stages of infantile development. Unfortunately, what is offered instead is a series of articles selected from a conference sponsored by the Education Testing Service.

For the most part the papers are behavioristic and emphasize statistical validation. There are no references to dynamic or analytic concepts. In an inaccurate statement the editors declare their justification for the volume:

For many years workers in development have neglected the significance of the interaction between mother and infant and in a sense the subtle contributions that each makes to the other in shaping their ongoing dyadic behavior (p. ix).

This statement ignores entirely the work of A. Freud, H. Hartmann, M. Mahler, R. Spitz, M. Fries, S. Brody, and M. Klein, to name just a few. It is not that the contributors have not heard of nor had contact with analytic thinking. One of the editors, Rosenblum, previously was a co-worker of Kaufman in a number of primate studies based on analytic principles. In the present volume, Rosenblum, in his paper titled Developmental Changes in Compensatory Dyadic Response in Mother and Infant Monkeys (co-authored by Youngstein) attempts to reduce the complexities of the dyadic interaction to mathematical formulae based on 'Gaussian decay function of the general form A₁E^Azt2' (p. 159). He asks if it is not somewhat pretentious to do so. I would agree that it is.

Other articles are generally no better. The titles are so general that it is not possible to be sure what the authors are attempting to study. For example, Brazelton, Kaslowski, and Mary Main in their article, The Origins of Reciprocity: The Early Mother-Infant Interaction, observed mothers and infants by way of special mir