Prologue: The Interpersonal World of the Autistic Infant: An Interdisciplinary View

In 2012, the Journal of the Nervous and Mental Disease published a posthumous interview with Daniel Stern who was asked about the relevance of developmental research to clinical theory. He brought up the case of autism:

Like his contemporary, Colwyn Trevarthen (a contributor to this issue), Daniel Stern had long sought to plumb the mystery of human sociality. What made it possible for a neonate to organize its bodily intentions in such a way that they could be discerned as meaningful to others? What sort of innate capacities permitted the infant to grasp their caregiver’s gestures and vocalizations as “holistic happenings” rather than a “blooming buzzing confusion”? In current parlance, each attended to a different ‘enactive’† (Varela et al., 1991) – pre-reflective, embodied – aspect of how infants made sense of their interpersonal world. Stern found a way to language the ‘silent world of movement’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 2000) into a comprehensive picture of embodied social perception. He showed that dyadic experience-sharing – our ability to affect and be affected by another – is underpinned by the mutual legibility of each partner’s expressive forms of dynamic vitality. In order to ‘read’ the nuances of others’ feeling states – and coordinate aims and intentions – we need to parse and resonate with the temporal-kinetic dynamic contours of their facial and bodily expressions. Trevarthen has brought attention to the innate response-seeking personhood of the infant (cf. Lichtenberg’s “the do-er doing”) demonstrating that infants come into the world with a “delicate and immediate awareness” of others and a “prospective” sensory-motor