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It is Fascinating and Cheering to Read seligman's and Silverman and Lieberman's generous attempts to build a bridge between concepts from the intersubjective approach to infant-parent psychotherapy and two key concepts from Kleinian psychoanalysis—projective identification and unconscious phantasy. Seligman suggests that two factors aid this bridge building: “(a) the image of the infant-parent dyad as a two-person, mutual-influence, mutual-regulation system and (b) new understandings of nonverbal patternings … of the internal structures of meaning that are organized in preverbal, affective, chorographic, and kinesthetic dimensions of self-with-other experience.” He cites Stern's (1985) and Beebe and Lachmann's (1988) descriptions of affect attunements, moments of disruption and repair, and “the moment-to-moment rhythms and tonalities that give both parent-infant and clinical interactions their distinctive feel.” He wants psychoanalysis to add a concentration on form to its more usual preoccupation with content, and he thinks that the Kleinian emphasis on unconscious phantasy—if only it can be loosed from its earlier bodily imagery, its psychic primitivity, its negativity, and, in particular, its tendency to ascribe too much responsibility to the patient—offers a rich set of descriptors, full of evocative intensity, of the subtle and complex “formattings” of dyadic influence.
Silverman and Lieberman take the intersubjective concepts and the Kleinian concepts and locate them on two different but related levels. They locate the language of infant-parent psychotherapy (e.g., the