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Empirical research on infant cognitive, perceptual, and social competence has had probably the most far-reaching impact on psychoanalytic ideas of any modern research program. It is interesting to remember that this domain of research owes its beginnings to psychoanalysis; it traces its origins to the psychoanalytic work (theory and practice) of Bowlby (1969), and others in the postwar period in Europe. In that social and political-economic crisis psychoanalysts (particularly in England) were in the forefront of efforts to repair the great disruption the war had onfamily life and the terrible impact of separations and parental loss on child development.
What we might call the entrepreneurial phase of infancy research was inaugurated in the 1960s in a series of important research programs whose impact on a general audience of psychologists and psychiatrists was profound. Church, Smith, and Murphy's (1973) edited collection marked as a crucial point in the dissemination of research findings on what infants could see, notice, remember, and attend to. Since that period, our view of infant life has been successively transformed, and this transformation affected on the working understanding of many subdisciplines in psychology. In the area of cognitive development, for example, infancy studies, in concert with other work have led to many revisions of early childhood cognitive capacity and have confirmed many of the Piagetian accounts of the unfolding of cognitive stages but placing many capacities, in their rudimentary forms, at earlier ages.
The empirical work, then, transformed psychoanalytic understanding of early experience, the linking or relay in that process being the highly influential work of Daniel Stern (1985). What Stern inaugurated