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It is perhaps useful to end this issue by providing a personal example of the way in which Ed Tronick’s work has influenced clinical work and clinicians’ efforts to integrate theory and practice. This brief epilogue provides information on my experiences as I learned about infant research while Ed was developing some of his major theoretical concepts, resulting in an integration of theories and techniques that I have called “the sandwich model” (Harrison, 2013).
My interest in infant research began long before I joined the Boston Change Process Study Group (BCPSG) and got to know Ed Tronick, but it was nurtured in those meetings where developmental processes at different stages of the lifespan were studied and discussed from many points of view—including the broad perspective of dynamic systems theory and the tiny lens of videotape microanalysis. I was starting my training in child analysis at the time and decided to videotape some of my child training cases. The observations offered to me by my colleagues in the Boston group, the expert baby watchers, were remarkable. An example is the process of making a connection that is reported in the case of Kate (Harrison and Tronick, 2007). During the course of 3 minutes, this 3-year old girl and I made a connection through words, of course, but through so much more. With new tools from infant research available to me, I could see the coordinated rhythms she and I established together with our bodies and our voices. These rhythms created a context for the symbolic content—the symbolic representation in the play of a transformation from someone who had to take care of herself, to someone who could ask for her needs to be met by another. One could think about what happened in terms of building a therapeutic alliance with the beginnings of a positive transference, but how much richer it is to see the actual moves in second by second process and put this microprocess together with the meaning of the words and play symbols.
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