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THE OBSERVATIONAL DATA THAT WE RELIED UPON TO HELP US TO conceptualize the development of the self were collected as part of the longitudinal study conducted by Eleanor Pavenstedt, Louis Sander, Gerald Stechler, and others, starting in 1954. A brief excursion into history will set the stage for our definition of what is "psychoanalytic" in our formulations. The antecedent and corollary studies of the Boston University project were conducted under the leadership of Beata Rank, Marian C. Putnam, and Samuel Kaplan at the James J. Putnam Children's Center. A series of informal well-baby conferences begun in 1949 led in 1961 to a more formal research endeavor, "Developmental Study Centered on Mutual Communication." We fully believed that we were then embarked on a truly psychoanalytic study of infant development.
In both projects, however, it became evident that the metapsychological concepts subsumed under the rubric of the economic, structural, and dynamic points of view were not applicable to the data flowing from direct observation. Furthermore, there was no way of bridging the gap between metapsychology and the data emerging from such fields as neurophysiology, ethology, psychology, and genetic epistemology (Piaget, 1936). Unfortunately,