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Some 40 years ago a group of investigators at the Menninger Foundation undertook a pilot study of mother-infant interaction in an effort to determine whether specific and definable patterns of mothering behavior could be demonstrated. A decade later, one of those investigators, Sylvia Brody, began what became a longitudinal study of the influence of such patterns on the development of a group of normal infants. In the present book, she and her associate, Miriam Siegel, describe the outcome of that study, which has followed their volunteered subjects through age 18 and, in some cases, through the early 20s. Their work represents the most extended and systematic study of its kind within the psychoanalytic frame of reference; as such it offers promise of substantial contributions to our understanding of character development and of the impact of early experience on the evolution of psychic structure and of psychopathology.
In the earlier phases of the study (reported in Brody, 1956; Brody & Axelrad, 1978), a typology of mothering patterns was