Anyone Concerned with human nature is drawn by curiosity to wonder about the subjective life of young infants. How do infants experience themselves and others? Is there a self to begin with, or an other, or some amalgam of both? How do they bring together separate sounds, movements, touches, sights, and feelings to form a whole person? Or is the whole grasped immediately? How do infants experience the social events of “being with” an other? How is “being with” someone remembered, or forgotten, or represented mentally? What might the experience of relatedness be like as development proceeds? In sum, what kind of interpersonal world or worlds does the infant create?

Posing these questions is something like wondering what the universe might have been like the first few hours after the big bang. The universe was created only once, way out there, while interpersonal