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This book is likely to please new parents, though it will be viewed more cautiously by psychoanalysts.
Diary of a Baby is a natural progression from Stern's earlier books, The First Relationship (Harvard University Press, 1977) and The Interpersonal World of the Infant (Basic Books, 1985). Combining elements of each of those, Diary of a Baby is directed at a lay audience and draws on both observational and experimental data for the purpose of inferring the infant's subjective experience and her growing sense of self and intersubjectivity.
The book is structured in the form of fictional diary entries at five critical epochs in an infant's life: the "World of Feelings" (at six weeks), the "Immediate Social World" (at four and one-half months), the "World of Mindscapes" (at twelve months), the "World of Words" (at twenty months), and the "World of Stories" (at four years). Each chapter begins with an overview of that developmental phase, followed by three views of an ordinary event in the life of a child at that age (e.g., at six weeks, observing a patch of sunlight; at twelve months, momentarily straying too far from mother; at four years, snuggling with parents in bed and helping mother prepare breakfast). For each event, Stern provides, first, a brief description of it, second, a putative "diary" entry, i.e., Stern's speculations regarding the infant's experience of the event rendered in highly evocative, impressionistic language, and finally, Stern's gloss on the episode in light of infant research.
Stern deserves credit for this creative and integrative approach, and for his continuing efforts to bridge the gap between the observed infant and the experiencing infant. His pioneering efforts to integrate research in developmental psychology with clinical issues are most accessible to parents in this book. Stern manages to introduce such notions as free association, identification and superego functioning, fantasy, displacement, transitional objects, and intersubj