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“A good developmental theory must encompass all outcomes, individual and atypical as well as universal and typical.”
This issue marks the second of a two-part issue exploring “The Interpersonal World of the Autistic Infant,” a project that reconsiders autism from a Sternian point of view. The first issue foregrounded the role of the implicit, embodied and relational dimensions of autistic development. This second issue examines the treatment implications of this emerging perspective. The relevance of Stern seemed apposite for a number of reasons: For one, psychoanalytic-adjacent developmentalists are increasingly putting autism under the “social microscope” (Beebe, 2018) of video microanalysis to examine early autistic development at the “local level.” Stern’s empirical-phenomenological approach – which posits the primacy of movement in early development – is proving indispensable in the search for a more clinically plausible autistic baby. His interdisciplinary construct of dynamic forms of vitality, in particular, has become an important bridging concept in contemporary research into autism, connecting the sensory-motor and the psychological realms and giving us an experience-near appreciation of how in-born autistic differences in intentional movement and holistic perception, i.e. in the expression and apprehension of dynamic forms of vitality, cascade in butterfly-like fashion to shape the broad developmental trajectory of the autistic infant. Moreover, just as Stern’s early research debunked the myth of an autistic phase in normal development, his colleagues’ work has chipped away at some of the myths that still inhere in depictions of infantile autism: in particular, paraphrasing Biklen and Biklen (2005), “the myth of the child alone”: As several papers in the first issue show, we can now appreciate that autistic infants demonstrate an intrinsic intersubjective inclination to engage in reciprocal, joyful interactions. It is the subtle impai