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This volume is not really a book. Rather, it is an edited transcription of a conference in which André Green and Daniel Stern heatedly debated the merit and liability of deriving theory from infancy observation to inform or modify psychoanalytic ideas. Joseph Sandler chaired this debate, which was held at University College, London, on November 1, 1997. Anne Alvarez, Rosine Perelberg, and Irma Pick served as discussants. The book includes two articulale, thoughtful essays, one by André Green and the other by Robert Wallerstein, that place this debate in the broader context of the relevance to psychoanalysis of any formal research.
The terms of the controversy are as follows: Green believes that there is no way of reconstructing the life of the infant that can be meaningful for psychoanalytic thought. Since all events from that early period of life must be reconstructed after their occurrence, observations of mother—infant interactions are subject to distortions of unconscious processes, defenses, and projections that are personal to any adult observer-interpreter who creates a narrative. In other words,