We review research evidence on the emergence and development of active "self-and-other" awareness in infancy, and examine the importance of its motives and emotions to mental health practice with children. This relates to how communication begins and develops in infancy, how it influences the individual subject's movement, perception, and learning, and how the infant's biologically grounded self-regulation of internal state and self-conscious purposefulness is sustained through active engagement with sympathetic others. Mutual self-other-consciousness is found to play the lead role in developing a child's cooperative intelligence for cultural learning and language. A variety of preconceptions have animated rival research traditions investigating infant communication and cognition. We distinguish the concept of "intersubjectivity", and outline the history of its use in developmental research. The transforming body and brain of a human individual grows in active engagement with an environment of human factors--organic at first, then psychological or inter-mental. Adaptive, human-responsive processes are generated first by interneuronal activity within the developing brain as formation of the human embryo is regulated in a support-system of maternal tissues. Neural structures are further elaborated with the benefit of intra-uterine stimuli in the foetus, then supported in the rapidly growing forebrain and cerebellum of the young child by experience of the intuitive responses of parents and other human companions. We focus particularly on intrinsic patterns and processes in pre-natal and post-natal brain maturation that anticipate psychosocial support in infancy. The operation of an intrinsic motive formation (IMF) that developed in the core of the brain before birth is evident in the tightly integrated intermodal sensory-motor coordination of a newborn infant's orienting to stimuli and preferential learning of human signals, by the temporal coherence and intrinsic rhythms of infant behaviour, especially in communication, and neonates' extraordinary capacities for reactive and evocative imitation. The correct functioning of this integrated neural motivating system is found to be essential to the development of both the infant's purposeful consciousness and his or her ability to cooperate with other persons' actions and interests, and to learn from them. The relevance of infants' inherent intersubjectivity to major child mental health issues is highlighted by examining selected areas of clinical concern. We review recent findings on postnatal depression, prematurity, autism, ADHD, specific language impairments, and central auditory processing deficits, and comment on the efficacy of interventions that aim to support intrinsic motives for intersubjective communication when these are not developing normally.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/3DC59499840534E5455EEDB895666BF6/S0021963001006552a.pdf/div-class-title-infant-intersubjectivity-research-theory-and-clinical-applications-div.pdf

Infant intersubjectivity: research, theory, and clinical applications.

Over the last ten years the basic knowledge of brain structure and function has vastly ex- panded, and its incorporation into the developmental sciences is now allowing for more complex and heuristic models of human infancy. In a continuation of this effort, in this two-part work I integrate current interdisciplinary data from attachment studies on dyadic affective communications, neuroscience on the early developing right brain, psychophysiology on stress systems, and psychiatry on psychopath- ogenesis to provide a deeper understanding of the psychoneurobiological mechanisms that underlie infant mental health. In this article I detail the neurobiology of a secure attachment, an exemplar of adaptive infant mental health, and focus upon the primary caregiver's psychobiological regulation of the infant's maturing limbic system, the brain areas specialized for adapting to a rapidly changing environment. The infant's early developing right hemisphere has deep connections into the limbic and autonomic nervous systems and is dominant for the human stress response, and in this manner the attachment relationship facilitates the expansion of the child's coping capcities. This model suggests that adaptive infant mental health can be fundamentally defined as the earliest expression of flexible strategies for coping with the novelty and stress that is inherent in human interactions. This efficient right brain function is a resilience factor for optimal development over the later stages of the life cycle.

/pdf/effects-of-a-secure-attachment-relationship-on-right-brain-50zhgw99e2.pdf

Effects of a secure attachment relationship on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health

Synchrony, a construct used across multiple fields to denote the temporal relationship between events, is applied to the study of parent-infant interactions and suggested as a model for intersubjectivity. Three types of timed relationships between the parent and child's affective behavior are assessed: concurrent, sequential, and organized in an ongoing patterned format, and the development of each is charted across the first year. Viewed as a formative experience for the maturation of the social brain, synchrony impacts the development of self-regulation, symbol use, and empathy across childhood and adolescence. Different patterns of synchrony with mother, father, and the family and across cultures describe relationship-specific modes of coordination. The capacity to engage in temporally-matched interactions is based on physiological mechanisms, in particular oscillator systems, such as the biological clock and cardiac pacemaker, and attachment-related hormones, such as oxytocin. Specific patterns of synchrony are described in a range of child-, parent- and context-related risk conditions, pointing to its ecological relevance and usefulness for the study of developmental psychopathology. A perspective that underscores the organization of discrete relational behaviors into emergent patterns and considers time a central parameter of emotion and communication systems may be useful to the study of interpersonal intimacy and its potential for personal transformation across the lifespan.

Parent-infant synchrony and the construction of shared timing; physiological precursors, developmental outcomes, and risk conditions.

The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment

Analytic work based on the intersubjective view of two participating subjectivities requires discipline rooted in an orientation to the structural conditions of thirdness. The author proposes a theory that includes an early form of thirdness involving union experiences and accommodation, called the one in the third, as well as later moral and symbolic forms of thirdness that introduce differentiation, the third in the one. Clinically, the concept of a co-created or shared intersubjective thirdness helps to elucidate the breakdown into the twoness of complementarity in impasses and enactments and suggests how recognition is restored through surrender.

Beyond doer and done to: an intersubjective view of thirdness.

Infant Research and Adult Treatment: Co-constructing Interactions

The contribution of mother-infant mutual influence to the origins of self- and object representations.

Using research on the purely social face‐to‐face exchange, we examine patterns of mother—infant interaction and their relevance for the presymbolic origins of self and object representations, focusing on the representation of inter‐relatedness between self and object. Based on a dyadic systems view in which the system is defined by both self‐ and interactive‐regulation processes, we argue that characteristic patterns of self and interactive regulation form early interaction structures, which provide an important basis for emerging self and object representations. What will be represented, presymbolically, is the dynamic interactive process itself, the interplay, as each partner influences the other from moment to moment. This is a dynamic, process view of “interactive”; or “dyadic”; representations. The argument that early interaction structures organize experience is based on a transformational model in which there are continuous transformations and restructurings, where development is in a constant stat...

Mother—infant interaction structures and presymbolic self‐ and object representations

Representation and internalization in infancy: three principles of salience

In the current climate of theoretical change, psychoanalysis is seeking a theory of interaction. We propose that principles of interactive organization documented in infant research have analogues in adult treatment. A systems model of the integration of self and mutual regulation is used to draw analogies, but not one-to-one correspondences, between infant research and adult psychoanalysis. We specifically address how self and mutual regulation impact on each other, arguing that internal and relational processes are simultaneously organized, in relation to each other, at all developmental levels. Co-constructing inner and relational processes: Self and mutual regulation in infant research and adult treatment Psychoanalysis has tended to privilege inner state as the focus of inquiry. Freud (l923) argued that perceptions of what goes on in the environment are never as important as those arising from within; that internal perceptions are more primordial, more elementary than perceptions arising externally, and that they have greater economic significance. Perceptions of the outer world are often seen as distorted through projections of the inner state. Instead, we suggest that the "inner" and the "outer" worlds are co-constructed, and thus are not separate domains. We distinguish between the two domains, but see them as fundamentally coordinated. By not privileging "inner" or "outer", and by emphasizing their reciprocal co- construction, we examine how dyadic process may (re-) organize both inner and relational processes, and reciprocally, how changes in self-regulation in either partner may alter the interactive process. In the past decade, efforts at conceptualizing systems views have been evident in both infant research and psychoanalysis. Each field, however, has come from the opposite bias. Heavily preoccupied with interactive regulation in the dyad, infant research on social development is only now seriously examining self regulation (see Tronick, 1989; Fox, 1994; Thompson, 1994). Similarly, psychoanalysis originally explicated the organization of inner states, and has only more recently seriously examined interaction in the dyad. Current versions of systems thinking conceptualizing interaction in psychoanalysis can be found, for example, in Stolorow, Atwood, and Brandschaft's (1987) intersubjectivity, Mitchell's (1988) relational psychoanalysis, Hoffman's (1983) and Gill's (1994) constructivist views, Aron's (1996) mutuality, Lichtenberg's (1989; Lichtenberg, Lachmann, & Fosshage, 1992) placement of five motivational systems within a mutual regulation model, Benjamin's (1988;1990) intersubjectivity, Ehrenberg's (1994) intimate edge, and Beebe, Jaffe, and Lachmann's (1992) dyadic systems model. These theorists all have in common the attempt to refine conceptualizations of psychoanalytic interaction. Systems thinking has also been implicit in much twentieth century psychoanalysis. For example, Ferenczi (1928), Balint (1968),

http://www.nyspi.org/Communication_Sciences/PDF/Infant%20research%20and%20adult%20treatment/BB-co-constructing%20inner%20and%20relational%203.6.07.pdf

Frank M. Lachmann

Papers

Infant Research and Adult Treatment: Co-constructing Interactions

The contribution of mother-infant mutual influence to the origins of self- and object representations.

Mother—infant interaction structures and presymbolic self‐ and object representations

Representation and internalization in infancy: three principles of salience

Co-constructing inner and relational processes: Self- and mutual regulation in infant research and adult treatment.