Infant Research and Self Psychology

Beebe and Lachman emphasize “mutual influence structures as the prime candidates for structuring the infant's experience.” Demos places “affect at the core of the neonate's capacity for inner awareness.” Self psychology refers to the self as an independent center of initiative and attributes primary organizing significance to self-selfobject experience. How can these formulations be integrated?

Beebe and Lachman draw their inferences about mutual influence structures primarily from the microanalysis of face-to-face contacts. Demos draws her inferences from the remarkably perceptive theory of Tomkins, tested by careful analysis of facial expressions and autonomic nervous system responses in babies and adults. Self psychology has drawn its formulation first from observations made on narcissistic personality disorder patients. The self of these patients ceased to operate as an independent center of initiative when deprived of the opportunity for mirroring, twinship or idealizing experiences. Their motivational centering was restored as a result of the self-selfobject experience that ensued from empathic understanding of this regulatory deficit. Later, less dramatic but similar alterations in self-cohesion were observed as a broadly human phenomena. How are we to go from the microanalyses of the faces of mothers and infants in social exchanges and the microanalyses of affect expressions and ANS (autonomic nervous system) responses to the micro-psychoanalysis of empathic immersion in the changing of self-states?

I shall approach the task of integration through a discussion of motivation and then apply the conceptions I offer to the observations of infants presented by Demos and Beebe and Lachman. The evidence does not support the traditional psychoanalytic assumption of a dual drive theory or, before eighteen months, the existence of symbolic