Author Description

For decades the collaboration of Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann has consistently provided the psychoanalytic community with a window on the clinical relevance of the evolving scientific understanding of early development. As the understanding of early parent-infant interaction has progressed, Beebe and Lachmann have served as outstanding guides to the dialogic origins of mind, bringing to bear expert knowledge in both clinical and research domains. Together they have made the case that the clinically salient pay-out from a generation of infant research lies less in a clearer grasp of infant mentation than in a thoroughly revised understanding of the very process of human relatedness. Infant Research and Adult Treatment is the first synoptic rendering of Beebe's and Lachmann's impressive body of work. Therapists unfamiliar with current research findings will find here a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of infant competencies. These competencies, as the authors demonstrate, give rise to presymbolic representations that are best understood from the standpoint of a systems view of interaction. It is through this conceptual window that the underpinnings of the psychoanalytic situation, especially the ways in which both patient and therapist find and use strategies for preserving and transforming self-organization in a dialogic context, emerge with new clarity.