Beebe, Cohen, and Lachmann: The Mother-Infant Interaction Picture Book: Origins of Attachment (W. Winograd)

The Mother-Infant Interaction Picture Book is a wonderful example of engaged scholarship—bringing the results of highly technical research to those who can best make use of it. After years of study, in plain and direct language, Beebe and her colleagues reach out to a wide audience that includes clinicians, parents, and any others who have an interest in infant development and the significance of caregiver-infant interaction. In an experience near style of writing, the authors bring the readers right into the research lab allowing us to feel the mothers’ joys, anxieties, and dreams and the infants’ laughter, hope, and distress.

In many ways, the book is a product of recent psychoanalytic times. With their emphasis on the significance of relationships in giving rise to identity and their attention to the way in which mothers and infants co-regulate emotional states, the authors situate themselves in the relational school and within attachment theory. Following from Ainsworth,† Bowlby,† and Stern,† and similar to other “baby-watchers,” such as Trevarthan and Aiken and Tronick and Reck,† they observe the behaviors and interactions of

mothers and infants and use micro-analytic techniques to study the data they collect. At the same time, they are reminiscent of Winnicott†, whose attention to the mother-infant dyad yielded a wealth of information about the relationally-based, progressive development of a fully dependent infant into a human being with an identity and self.

The Mother-Infant Interaction Picture Book aims not only to present research findings from decades of observation of infants and mothers, but also to offer the reader a unique look into the research process itself. In effect, readers of the book are treated to an introduction to Beebe