Prologue

The earliest acknowledgment of the potentially complementary relationship between psychoanalysis and infant research came from Freud himself. In his Three Essays (1905), he observed that

Psychoanalytic investigation, reaching back into childhood from a later time, and contemporary observation of children combine to indicate to us still other regularly active sources of sexual excitation. The direct observation of children has the disadvantage of working upon data which are easily misunderstandable; psycho-analysis is made difficult by the fact that it can only reach its data, as well as its conclusions, after long detours. But by co-operation the two methods can attain a satisfactory degree of certainty in their findings [p. 201].

In pointing to the need for cooperative exchange between these “two methods,” Freud testified to the fact that psychoanalysts and infant researchers define their tasks, and arrive at their goals, in very different ways. Psychoanalysts, focusing on the psychopathology of adults, attempt to reconstruct retrospectively the early circumstances bearing on the genesis of this psychopathology. Infant researchers, focusing on the normal infant, attempt to delineate patterns of behavior on the basis of direct observation. To thus highlight the fundamental orientation is, by implication, to allude to what each type of investigator is apt to overlook. The clinical analyst is frequently inattentive to what transpires during the first two years of life, when symbolic-representational mental functioning is subordinate to sensorimotor functioning in the sense of Piaget. The observer of infant behavior, on the other hand, may be equally inattentive to the manner in which early impressions become transformed into representational systems that, duly elaborated, impart