Infant–parent interactions, phantasies, and an "internal two-person psychology"

This chapter shows how intersubjective infant research and modern Kleinian thinking can be brought together to yield a strong psychoanalytic model of psychic life oriented in a theory of internal two-person structures. I take off from the observationally oriented infant researchers’ emphasis on interaction processes to look at two different fathers interacting with their babies. This chapter makes a series of intertwined points. Specifically, the infant observation researchers can illuminate the Kleinian concept of phantasy, and especially, projective identification. I also clarify how a detailed analysis of the fine details of infant-parent interaction can illuminate the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Two vignettes are offered, one of an African-American baby with his positively engaged father, and another of a three-day-old Caucasian baby with a father who was himself abused as a child by his own father. I hope to show that attention to the Kleinian concepts along with the intersubjective point of view allows us to think simultaneously in “one-person” and “two-person” terms.