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Over the last two decades a vast increase in research findings about infants has yielded an astonishing amount of new information. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are currently witnessing a revolution in our thinking about the infant's capabilities and the developmental process. And, as in all revolutions, older established theories are likely to be radically altered or discarded. In this particular revolution, the two theories most vulnerable to challenges are the developmental theories proposed by psychoanalysis and by Piaget. Psychoanalysts have become increasingly interested in the findings from infant research and are asking whether and in what ways their clinical work and theoretical assumptions must be affected. Joseph Lichtenberg's book Psychoanalysis and Infant Research is just such an inquiry.
Lichtenberg is very clear that the data of psychoanalysis deals with symbolic representations of experience—verbalizations of sensations, fantasies, memories—and that much of infant research deals with prerepresentational experiences—events that occur before the advent of language and the capacity for symbolic representations (roughly before 18 months of age). He nevertheless argues that the important question is whether the data from infant research “lend themselves to or indeed compel a reexamination of basic psychoanalytic hypotheses” (p. 4). Thus Lichtenberg's goal is not so much to effect an integration of infant data with psychoanalytic