Infant Research and Adult Treatment: Co-constructing Interactions Book

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. Beebe and Lachmann not only show how their understanding of treatment has evolved, but illustrate this process through detailed descriptions of clinical work with long-term patients. Throughout, they demonstrate how participation in the dyadic interaction reorganizes intrapsychic and relational processes in analyst and patient alike, and in ways both consonant with, and different from, what is observed in adult-infant interactions. Of special note is their creative formulation of the principles of ongoing regulation; disruption and repair; and heightened affective moments. These principles, which describe crucial facets of the basic patterning of self-organization and its transformation in early life, provide clinical leverage for initiating and sustaining a therapeutic process with difficult to reach patients. Written by psychoanalytic practitioners for psychoanalytic practitioners, this book provides a bridge from the phenomenology of self psychological, relational, and intersubjective approaches to a systems theoretical understanding that is consistent with recent developments in psychoanalytic therapy and amenable to further clinical investigation. Both as reference work and teaching tool, as research-grounded theorizing and clinically relevant synthesis, Infant Research and Adult Treatment is destined to be a permanent addition to every thoughtful clinician's bookshelf.Read More