Clinical implications of infancy research

Infant development research supports an intersubjective-relational, “two-person psychology” orientation to psychodynamic clinical work and theory: Infancy research linked with Relational Psychoanalysis in building a flexible way of integrating interaction and understanding in psycho analytic therapeutic technique. This includes a number of basic elements: a multimodal, relationship-oriented view of psychopathology and therapeutic action; conceptualizations psychotherapies and caregiving relationships as transactional systems, in which knowledge and meaning are jointly constructed by both partners; an affirmative approach to analytic interaction; an interest in implicit, affective, and nonverbal processes; a new and more varied view of “the Unconscious”; attention to trauma and the attention to actual experience in both present and past; dissociation, self-states, and the integration of fragmented selves. The infant developmentalists’ assertion that relationships were primary dislocated the instinct model’s assumptions about infancy and, correspondingly, about the instinctual-primitive core of human psychology, child development, psychic structure, psychopathology, and clinical technique. The classical “metaphor of the baby” (Mitchell, 1988), then, as passive and driven from within was neither theoretically viable sustained as reflecting observed reality.