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The quest to establish an objective foundation for the enigmatic issues of selfhood and relations between selves places infant research at the center of the courageous effort to resolve ontological problems using an epistemological body of knowledge.
Beebe, Lachmann, and Jaffe's scholarly paper is an instructive example of the revolution taking place in infant research, a revolution inspired by the evolution of psychoanalysis from its previous stages of energy and structure to its ontological stage of experience (Kulka, 1988).
The authors' core idea is of the a priori existence of a permanent interactive system between the infant and his mother in which the experiences of self, other, and self-with-other come into being. This notion receives an astonishing empirical verification in this paper through an abundance of observational and experimental results, all of which convincingly show that the unfolding of the human infant's immeasurable potential is not the product of an autonomous development but is the actual process of the mother-infant dyad itself.
The authors' claim that psychoanalysis has not yet recognized the concept of a systemic dyad as an essence in and of itself is most perspicacious, and the possibility of formulating interactiveness as a psychoanalytic concept would indeed be an achievement. The conception of human interaction as an entity defined not by its components—the self and the other—but by the process of its own interactiveness necessitates a deviation from the Newtonian worldview on which psychoanalytic metapsychology is based. The paper's main achievement is that it