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According to Jerome Bruner, we are born “storytelling creatures” (Bruner, 2003). All our narratives, whatever they are “about,” are motor performances with serial organization through episodes of vitality (Stern, 2010). Narrative behavior, “inherent in the praxis of social interaction before it achieves linguistic expression” (Bruner, 1990, p. 77), is a foundation of conversational meaning making and culture (Cobley, 2014). The Mother-Infant Picture Book by Beebe, Cohen, and Lachman is an example of scholarly and creative storytelling at is best, a tale of coconstruction, imagination, and curiosity.
This book is an exercise in attunement and paying close attention. The authors offer the reader a clear explanation of the valuable applications of attachment research to the understanding of the emerging world of the infant in the context of the primary caregiving relationship. Furthermore, they invite the reader to join them in imagining, feeling, and listening while observing in a different way, away from our usual implicit and procedural modes. The result is an invaluable addition to the world of infant research, developmental psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytic practice in general. Based on 30 years of meticulous research, Beebe and colleagues present in this volume a concise and well-structured summary of the high-quality work we have come to expect from this clinical researcher and her collaborators. The book opens with an invitation to the reader to be “amazed”:
You see how the infant's and parent's faces open and widen into the most glorious smiles. But you also see how the infant's and parents’ faces become sober, sad, distressed, averted or withdrawn. You see sharp bodily aversions, a sudden cry face, or the reaction of going limp. You see how each partner affects the other, from one moment to the next. This book takes you on a journey in which you will be amazed at what you see. (p. 1)
Daniel Stern's work is evoked pictorially—specifically, his descriptions of id