CHAPTER ONE

HOW DO WE EXPLAIN THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNICATION WITH SELF AND OTHER IN INFANCY? PART 1

Our purpose is to offer clinicians a way to reconceptualize both the significance hitherto given to verbal associations and insight, and the importance now given to empathy and relational interaction. Communication is in our view the overarching phenomenon that integrates the verbal and nonverbal features of analytic therapy. By communication we mean exchanges of explicit and implicit information interpersonally and to one’s self. The main body of the book details our view of communication during treatment. But first we will take up communication during infancy. Communication is an integral part of the developing child’s intersubjective world long before the symbolic meaning of words are the shared currency of caregiver-infant informational exchanges. In the first two chapters we describe the origin of the development of communication before and after symbol sharing. We will emphasize a two-way stream of communication balanced between attentiveness to inner self and attentiveness to others.

We will draw on our prior writings (Lichtenberg, 1989; Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage, 1992, 1996) in which we proposed five motivational systems. Each motivational system develops in response to an innate need and each involves caregiver’s responses. The five motivational systems self-organize and self-stabilize in response to the need for (1) regulation of physiological requirements; (2) attachment to individuals and affiliation to groups; (3) exploration and the assertion of preferences; (4) aversive reactions of antagonism and withdrawal; and (5) sensual enjoyment and sexual excitement. Between each system and within each system dialectic tensions exist so that the dominance of experience by a particular system is in constant flux in response to changes in context and intersubjective pressures. Hierarchical rearrangement within developing systems is a constant feature. This feature of motivational systems, their potential for hierarchial alteration, is particularly important to our presentation in chapters 1 and 2 of the development of communication and in subsequent chapters in the portrayal of change during psychoanalytic therapies conducted in a spirit of inquiry.

Throughout the book we make frequent references to attachment research and theory. We refer to the categories established through the Strange Situation Test. Based on the SST, researchers have identified specific strategies infants utilize to ensure a stable base of safety. One strategy played out between child and caregiver ensures a secure attachment. Other strategies of anxious-resisting and avoidance serve to maintain an insecure attachment. In some instances, any of these strategies prove unworkable and for periods of time infants will lapse into stages of disorganization, disorientation, and even dissociation. Adults have also been tested by an attachment interview, the AAI, as to their state of mind with respect to their attachment experiences. The groupings are those whose state of mind with respect to attachment are autonomous and secure, those that are preoccupied and those that are dismissive. In addition there are those who by virtue of being unresolved to loss and trauma suffer lapses in coherence, disorientation, and dissociation (see Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 1989, Vol. 19, No. 4: Attachment Research and Psychoanalysis: Theoretical Considerations, and No. 5: Clinical Implications).

We hold to a bidirectional, interactional systems view of communication. At times we may emphasize: (1) the child’s (or patient’s) communicative contribution as a self-regulating system; and (2) the caregiver’s (or therapist’s) communications as a self-regulating system ideally guided by empathic responsiveness and a spirit of provision (or inquiry). But neither system can be described without reference to (3) the parent-child (therapist-patient) dyad as an interactive communicative field—a uniquely organized system of its own (see Beebe and Lachmann, 2002).

After the developmental chapters, we will reframe familiar and current concepts of therapy by considering psychoanalysis as a process of communication conducted in a spirit of inquiry.

Part 1: The Emergence of a Communicative Self (0 to 18 Months)

As living organisms, we are dependent on nutritional-expulsion exchanges. As primates we are dependent on relational exchanges. As humans we are dependent on informational exchanges that facilitate communication with others and especially with ourselves. Why especially with ourselves? Probably alone of primates, humans have a stream of consciousness that, after the development of symbolization, allows us to converse with ourselves. From an early age, our experience involves a continuous interplay between discourse with others and discourse with ourselves. Communication is enlivened by affects triggered by perception of the external and inner world. The interplay of our experience affects what we can know about ourselves and how we feel about it. To be intimate with others is a widely recognized goal of human development. Less well recognized as a primary goal is to be intimate with oneself. What can we sense about ourselves, our feelings, sensations, thoughts, intentions, our view of others and our view of the view others have of us? Does our sense of self allow us to live within our skin more or less contentedly and productively? Along with empathic sensitivity, a cohesive sense of self, intersubjectivity, and systems of motivation, communication offers a perspective that is necessary to feel our way into how intimacy with others and with one’s self develops.

Affects and sensations are basic to a sense of familiarity with oneself and to the mode of consciousness of infancy. The uniquely human level of post-infancy consciousness depends on a symbolic realm mediated through words, images, and metaphor integrated with affect and sensation. The symbolic processing of information is fundamental to the stream of internal monologue-dialogue that characterizes communication with oneself and accompanies speech to others. Communication, however, including parent’s speech from birth (and before), is interwoven in all caregiver-infant exchanges long before symbolic processing by the baby is possible. Talking with and to a baby not only consolidates attachment but also builds intuitive communicative capacities prior to words themselves becoming the medium for the exchange of meaning. Growing infants are held in their caregivers’ symbolic world before they form one of their own. Caregivers ease their infants into a symbolic world of inner and outer communication by conveying their recognition of their particular baby through the flow of their “chatter” to and with the baby. Failure to communicate the recognition of a baby’s humanness (subjectivity) and essential uniqueness will impair the development of that baby’s attachment and other motivational systems and its sense of self.

Various essential provisions need to evolve from the explicit and implicit regulation of caregiver and infant. Attachment research has documented a sense of safety as the caregiver provides a secure base at times of danger and loss (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980; Main, 2000). Self psychology and motivational systems theory have described the sensitive balancing of needs of each partner across a spectrum of motivational systems (Lichtenberg, 1989).

Concomitant with a view of a sense of self evolving out of the dynamics of infant-caregiver interactions, modern neurophysiology envisions the brain’s evolving out of the constant mutual influence of an innate adaptive potential and the environment. Edelman (1987, 1992) posits the brain developing before birth as a process of neuronal selection guided by genetic instructions. During fetal development, neurons and neuronal groups migrate in unpredictable ways to form unique patterns of cortical circuitry. After birth a second selection begins, guided by basic biases (values) that are experienced as feelings. After birth very little is preprogrammed; mostly the brain creates itself through a dynamic interaction with the environment. Gone are static views of structures formed fixedly, functions tightly localized, and simple restraints like feedback homeostatic control. Theorists such as Edelman and Damasio (1999) describe a brain that has both stability and extraordinary plasticity enabling it to undergo self-organization and emergent order with every lived experience. Memory is no longer encoded or deposited in the brain and reactivated in photographic fixity, but is initially selected by bias and is context-dependent in its recall. Perception and sensation are not simply recordings of the external and internal worlds but are acts of creation made through categorization and mapping. Maps are not merely laid down as functional tracks but are constantly reformed and recategorized. A continuous communication, characterized by Edelman as reentrant signaling, connects the active maps. As individuals organize their own categories, maps, and reentrant signals, a world of personal meaning and reference is constructed.

Consciousness is created in two momentous steps. The linking of very early memory maps with a current perception creates primary (Edelman) or core (Damasio) consciousness—a state of being mentally aware of things in the world in the form of here-and-now lived experience. The second step, a linking of symbolic memory, linguistically organized concepts, and a representation of self, creates higher-order consciousness. In higher-order (Edelman) or extended (Damasio) consciousness, concepts of self, past, and future can be connected to here and now awareness. Consciousness of consciousness, and reflective recognition of cognitive affective intentional states becomes possible. The complex picture of a brain creating an ever-changing individualistic picture of a world full of personal meaning coincides with our sense of a self experiencing an integrated and orchestrated stream of consciousness. Overall these theories postulate continuous communication within the brain in linkage with internal and external perception.

An Emergent Sense of Self (0–2 Months)

Neonates can be viewed as setting up an ecological niche in which they recreate conditions that enable them to experience familiar states by which they recognize themselves (Sander, 1983). How can we envision the emergent sense of neonates becoming familiar with themselves? The caregiver’s contribution to the ecological niche lies in empathic recognition of and response to the infant’s internally derived needs. The infant’s contribution lies in being able to offer recognizable signals of need and to activate specific innate and learned response patterns that permit the caregiver’s responses to be effective. An example is an infant’s cry that her mother correctly reads as hunger and institutes holding and feeding. The infant’s experience would combine an internal sensation of discomfort with a generalized feeling of distress, the activation of sucking with rhythmical rate changes, followed by the relief of distress and sensations leading to an internal sensation of fullness. The internal sensation of fullness may become distress from abdominal distention requiring relief by burping. The release of air may be followed by more intake to a point of satiety, disinterest in sucking, and conclude with rejection of the nipple. The mother’s experience is one of efficacy in her ministrations and the recognition of the particularities of her baby at that time. She is apt to express this as: “Oh, you were really hungry. OK I’m here. Oh, you need to be burped. OK now. Well you really have slowed down. I guess you’ve had enough.” The inevitable repetitions of this shared response pattern creates for the baby an experience of changing affect states. The changing affect states combine bodily sensations of internal and generalized distress, supportive holding and positioning, internal fullness and generalized relief, perceptions of mother’s face, eye contact, and her spoken voice. We are aware that our description implies more linearity than is appropriate for the complex interactive system of mutual influence in continuous operation between infant and caregiver.

A “package” of changing internal affect-laden state changes and external tactile, visual, olfactory, and auditory perceptions repeated with the same person or similarly enough with more than one caregiver becomes for the neonate a familiar re-creation, a memory map, a presymbolic nonverbal story (Damasio, 1999) or “scene” (Edelman, 1992) that we believe is experienced as an emergent sense of self. Bucci offers a similar accounting: “The chunking of continuous representations into prototypic images based on equivalence of structure, or function, or association in time and place may occur across as well as within modalities … (forming) … prototypic episodes.… Repeated episodes provide the basis for the construction of … emotion schemas, from the beginning of life, well prior to the acquisition of language, and also determine the process by which emotional experience may be symbolized and communicated to other” (1997, p. 183). Of course, feeding is but one of many repeated interactions that have a feeling story to be remembered and re-created—eliminating and being diapered, being put to sleep, being conversed with and stimulated pleasurably during alert periods of comfort, being soothed at times of nonspecific fussiness, being held, fondled, kissed, tussled about, being left without direct intrusion to explore crib, toy, or a button on mother’s blouse.

The terms “emergent” and “re-create” require further elaboration. To conceive of an infant as capable of the experience of re-creating implies several innate abilities. In experiments, infants have been found to change their sucking rhythm or turn their heads a set number of times to one side (Papousek and Papousek, 1975) in order to turn on a light display they are preprogrammed to enjoy (“value,” Edelman). The infants will continue to do this much longer if they are the agent than if the light is turned on for them or randomly activated. In conversational runs with their mother, infants will activate responses when their mother pauses or is distracted. We assume the infants have a primitive form of agency—I do it, I start it, I create it, and, now that it is repeated, I re-create it. Only what marks the re-creation for the infant? We believe the “actions” become meaningful as affect-sensory experiences—interest, a sense of efficacy, and competence in the exploratory activities, and joy of intimacy eventuating in the enlivening smile and body jiggling. In Damasio’s view, these actions produce such changes that the organism has a “feeling” of knowing about, that is, the infant has a feeling that he can sense that he is feeling.

Emergent has a double meaning: awareness begins and I become aware. We can draw an analogy to awakening in a strange room. First, light enters your eyes and next you are aware of the change from sleep state, more what has happened than what you have done. Then you feel the stuffed sensation in your nose and remember you have a cold, so it is you who is awakening. But, with some anxiety, where? You scan your surroundings, place yourself in your friend’s house, and take mental charge of your emergence into the day ahead. Using a similar construct, Damasio (1999) states that “stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental” (p. 3). Thus we can say we re-create our self each day that we metaphorically step into awakeness or after any major affective state change, as from a fright to a state of calm. This is not in accord with the Cartesian formula “I know therefore I am,” but is rather a matter of I feel and I sense I feel right now, therefore I am I. This here-and-now-I-am emerges into being with core consciousness. The core consciousness of self precedes higher consciousness and language organized thought when the child can reflectively recognize and monitor thoughts, feelings, plans, and prior actions.

For this explanation of an emergent sense of self to be credible, the central nervous system must have a number of complex capacities present at or very shortly after birth. Lived experience in the form of core consciousness involves perception, categorization, and mapping. Similar repeated sequences must be generalized and recategorized, and simple contingent or causal links established. Moreover, recognition of changes of affect states must be appreciated as a process that is occurring for a sense of creating and re-creating to evolve. The repeated experience and the sense of re-creating activates an elemental consciousness that is both flowing and differentiated in the here and now. Categorization, generalization, and recategorization are responsible for the organization of discrete states into feeling stories or affect schemas. However, much lived experience and communication occurs as a continuous flow (Fogel, 1993; Knoblauch, 1996, 2000) of nonverbal contours of vocal and breathing volume, rhythm, tempo, and tone, and of gestural patterning, proprioceptive shifts of face and body, body gurgles, smells, and expulsions. In caregiver-infant exchanges these continuous processes have a background influence on the essential affect tonality mapped into the more discrete feeling stories. Their ephemeral micromoments and bidirectional flow give to both early and later communication a basic pattern of being shaped by loosely formulated nonverbal cues that flow along with later exchanges of verbalized symbolic meanings.

Damasio (1999) proposes a theory of the development of elemental consciousness that coincides to a degree with the view we espouse:

As the brain forms images of an object—such as a face, a melody, a toothache, the memory of an event—and as the images of the object affect the state of the organism, yet another level of brain structure creates a swift nonverbal account of the events that are taking place in the varied brain regions activated as a consequence of the object-organism interaction. The mapping of the object-related consequences occurs in first-order neural maps representing proto-self and object; the account of the causal relationship between object and organism can only be captured in second-order neural maps..… [W]ith the license of metaphor, one might say that the swift second-order nonverbal account narrates a story: that of the organism caught in the act of representing its own changing state as it goes about representing something else. But the astonishing fact is that the knowable entity of the catcher has been created in the narrative of the creative process [p. 110].

Damasio equates core consciousness with the narrative account formed in a near-infinite series of pulses as we navigate the world. He cites the hippocampus, brain stem, and insula as the brain structures most involved in the detailed making and unmaking of neural maps or representations of the total physical state. The non-conscious foundation of self that Damasio calls “protoself” arises from the collective maps forming and altering a response to encounters requiring homeostatic adjustment. The essence of the core self is the representation in a second order map of the protoself being modified. “Because of the permanent availability of provoking objects, it [core consciousness] is continuously generated and thus appears continuous in time” (p. 175). The well-spring of consciousness is not language but the feeling of knowing that we have feelings.

Returning to psychological observation, affects prime the neonate to activate innate and learned responses to anything that alleviates an aversive state or augments a positive state. The infant is thus motivated to connect antecedents and consequences, that is, to learn incrementally (Tomkins, 1962, 1963). The intrapsychic development of a sense of self is inextricably context related or, in Kohut’s terms, the baby’s self is strong because it is embedded in a self-selfobject matrix. I would add that the self can only be construed as “strong” if (1) the sense of self develops as an affective being who has been responded to by an animated empathically sensitive caregiver ready to initiate needed provision and, (2) the sense of self includes a conviction of being able to initiate affective, need-fulfilling responses from the caregiver. The baby’s growing sense of an elementary I-ness through the re-creation of affective experience combined with a recognition of being able to trigger affective need-fulfilling responses from the caregiver (a we-ness) fills out Kohut’s definition of self as a center of initiative.

The sensitivity of the communication of affective state between caregiver and neonate can be appreciated through the study of both pairs who are successfully able to bring about secure attachment (Katie, our second example) and pairs in which insecure attachment (Main, 2000) occurs even in this early period, as in the case of Kierra.

Kierra

One of us (JL) was asked by a research group to evaluate the videotapes of a bottle feeding of 18-day-old Kierra by her 16-year-old mother in a facility for single first-time mothers who had no other support. I evaluated the feeding as effective in nutrient transmission and ordinary in maternal attentiveness although the mother was essentially silent throughout. I next viewed a feeding at one month 22 days in which Kierra was fully head and eye averted from her silent mother, who appeared both unaware and unconcerned. The researchers told me they had reviewed the tapes repeatedly before discovering a clue to how in the 18-day feeding the mother was communicating to Kierra that while she was conscientiously performing the task of feeding, she was not enacting or creating an intersubjective experience with the baby. While she held Kierra firmly enough and positioned the bottle well with her right arm and hand, her left hand was limp with a small space between her hand and the baby’s body. Further while her eyes were focused attentively, it was not clear that she was observing the baby. The mother had been told to burp the baby when the bottle reached a mark so it is probable that the silent young mother was more attentive to the bottle than Kierra. At the 1-month 22-day feeding the left hand was completely detached from any connection to Kierra.

A bath scene at 18 days strongly suggested that Kierra’s mother was relating to her as an inanimate object whom or which she had to service. Kierra’s whole body was scrubbed vigorously by the silent 16-year-old who, in her determination to do what she was instructed to do, appeared to be oblivious of the child’s continuous loud crying. Kierra’s crying is so painful to audiences who hear the tape that they recoil long before the two-minute sequence is complete.

At nine months, a play sequence with her mother reveals a stationary depressed child neatly dressed who doesn’t crawl or demonstrate any interest in toys. At 18 months, during the initial part of a feeding, Kierra is attentive to the video and not her mother. Then, for a brief moment, the two make contact as Kierra offers her mother a marshmallow. This sequence shows Kierra being able to develop a degree of attachment through a reversal of caregiving. At 24 months, in an outdoor play sequence, Kierra signaled her desire to be picked up while her mother wanted to continue to play with the toys.

As the patterns of being cared for by her young mother became repetitive, what affects can we use our empathy to imagine Kierra re-created, forming the origins of her emergent sense of self? On the positive side Kierra could come to experience that a re-creation of a sensation of hunger and the affect of distress would lead to sucking, nutrient intake, relief, and satiety. This positive re-creation would result in a degree of homeostatic stability in her nonconscious protoself and a conscious sense of core self as a successful initiator in this significant repeated pattern of physiological regulation. Successful initiation of signals to be fed can serve as the basis for a reversal into feeding another in play with dolls or as observed later in her feeding of her mother, their most effective moment of mutual attachment intimacy. The premise behind this finding is that all patterns are formed in their neural pathways as dualities of self and other, as done to and doer, recipient or agent (Beebe, Lachmann, and Jaffe, 1997). We can also recognize a positive side to Kierra’s mother’s persistence as caregiver, thereby creating the core sense of familiarity with the affects triggered by her appearance, smell, sound, and touch. As attachment research has indicated, infant and mother will form a strategy for their essential connection even if its form is insecure. Insecure is more than a categorical designation, however, it is an affect—the opposite of a sense of safety. The sense of insecurity, repeated in every feeding, every bathing, every joyless episode of play, is a powerful communication from mother to child. The message is: I can’t or don’t hold you in a manner to prevent your feeling unsupported. I can’t touch your skin so you feel sensually embraced. I can’t bathe you in my affectionate informative chatter because I can only communicate my dulled silence, the deadness of what I can internally communicate with myself. Without my or your knowing how it came about, you will re-create a depressive avoidant deadness as your frequent response to me, yourself, and others. By one month and 22 days, Kierra is saying in actions, I can re-create a more satisfying core consciousness by looking off into the room or at the man with the camera than by looking at your immobile face. Since you don’t seem to notice, we can fall into this mutual, detached attachment as a given of our life together.

The Developing Core Sense of Self (2 to 8 Months)

Katie, the 14½-week-old first child of a sensitive middle-class married mother is seen sitting at a feeding table. The videotape made in the course of family life by the father has been used as a research control indicating secure attachment. As her mother fills a spoon with a gooey white substance, Katie moves her hands from her face holding her arms and hands up at her side. In synchrony with the spoon’s arrival Katie opens her mouth and as the spoon is withdrawn she moves her hands to her face to push at the residue all over her mouth. This is repeated a number of times with an occasional face wipe with a cloth by her mother who chats with Katie periodically. If Katie is not ready, mother pauses and goes forward or withdraws the spoon. If mother is not ready, Katie does not take the arms extended position. At one point Katie’s father introjects a teasing remark about how much they like their new house, and Katie’s mother turns to make a sardonic retort so that both parents have withdrawn their attention from Katie. Viewed in slow motion, Katie can be seen to turn her gaze away, droop her head, and slump her posture. Her appearance in the split screen is one of sadness. This whole sequence occupies about 30 seconds. As Katie’s mother refocuses on her, Katie is instantly revitalized and they immediately resume their well-choreographed dancelike interplay. Finally, Katie indicates a beginning loss of interest in the food, switches to controlling the spoon herself, and then stops. Mother states, “Oh you’ve had enough,” offers a bottle which Katie refuses, ending the feeding sequence. At 9 months Katie, seated at the same feeding table, is picking up Cheerios with interest and happily feeding herself.

When looked at from a variety of sequences—bathing, feeding, play, “conversations,” hugging, kissing, and upset moments—the tapes of Katie and her mother and father demonstrate the communicative power of affective attunement. In the course of making constant adjustment to the affective and gestural signals of the other, mother, child, and father establish a rhythmic relatedness that raises or lowers thresholds of arousal. Looked at behaviorally, correct affect and gestural appreciation smoothes the way for physiological regulation, attachment intimacy, exploratory play and assertiveness, rapid recovery from aversive states, and sensual enjoyment. Looked at as a form of communication, correct affect and gestural appreciation establishes the infant’s core sense of self through the recognition of her individuality and her connection to her particular parents. Katie becomes Katie as her mother and father establish “I know you—you like to eat slowly and be talked to and play in the water, and—and you belong to this mother and this father—and we belong to you.” Attunement, mutual responsiveness, and communication lead to neural pathways, what Damasio calls “stories” of Katie in this or that activity. The sets of neural pathways bearing on these exchanges, those of Katie’s and those of her mother’s and father’s, will coincide more or less well. In Katie’s psyche, the core sense of self is one of core consciousness of her identity in shifting motivational states with words as a familiar perceptual and categorical component of herself being with others but as yet without symbolic meaning. In her parents’ psyche Katie has a verbally organized biographic self that is being interwoven into their individual and collective (family) biographic senses of self. Eventually as Katie forms her own symbolically organized biographic self from her remembered lived experiences, her sense of who she is will coincide more or less well with the biographic self preconceived for her—preparation for a “true” self (Winnicott, 1960) as her securely attached core self would predict.

Our understanding of attunement—to bring into harmony—has been greatly enhanced by research on mother-infant interaction. Stern (1985) described the cross-modal responsiveness by which a mother watching an infant at play waving a block will hum, head wag, hand gesture, or foot tap in a matching rhythm and intensity. Recent studies by Jaffe et al. (1999) on vocal exchanges further advance our knowledge of attunement. They confirm that “proto-conversational rhythmic coordination of sound and silence is important in conveying emotional information prior to speech onset” and that “coordinated interpersonal timing is an early communication system in infancy and constitutes a scaffolding for infant social development.” In their research, the process central to attunement shifts from matching to tracking. Contrary to the expectation that a high coordination of maternal tracking of an infant’s communication was optimal, the researchers found that too high a degree of coordination represented a hypervigilent form of mutual influence. We propose that excessive coordination would be experienced by the infant as intrusive, a primitive form of entrapment (Meares, 2000). A high level of coordination, especially as it played out under stress with a stranger, was predictive of anxious-resistant or disorganized/disoriented attachments. Optimal coordination in interpersonal tuning lay in the middle range and was predictive of secure attachment at one year. They note a striking parallel to research on rhythmic communication between neural networks in the forebrain, where a midrange degree of coordination correlated with maximal transmission of information. Midrange in practice means “slow down, follow the baby slowly, repeat but slightly vary sounds or expressions, ‘cool it’ when the baby facially dampens or looks away, and generally stay with baby’s arousal level (without ever topping it).”

Alternatively, insufficient coordination with the infant’s vocal rhythms is devitalizing, a predicter of an avoidant insecure attachment. At four months, coordination of interpersonal timing is not a fixed phenomenon. It varies with whether it is with a familiar person or a stranger in a familiar place such as the house or an unfamiliar laboratory. The variance of response attests to the complexity of the four-month-old’s social capacity. At one year of age, dialogic vocal rhythms are predictive of social interactions. The Jaffe, Beebe group see the varying rhythmic patterns as social procedures for managing attention, activity level, turntaking, joining, interruption, yielding, and tracking. Operant as procedural memories, infants and toddlers use these patterns to coordinate with adults and to respond to novelty and challenge.

Communication during the first year has also been studied in the triangular form of mother, father, and infant (Fivaz-Depeursinge and Corboz-Warnery, 1999). Using an experimental design with the three participants seated in an equilateral triangle, observations were based on how well the family system worked to sustain play and make transitions. Four sequences and three transitions were required: first, one parent plays with the child, the other observes; second, a transition to the other parent playing, the first observing; then, a transition to all three involved in play, and finally, a transition to the parents being primarily involved with each other. Observations began at three months and continued at intervals during the first year of the baby’s life. The experimenters observed the movements of the pelvis, torso, gazes, and facial expressions. Were baby and each parent participating in the assigned goal? Were they maintaining focal attention, guiding their interactions with each other? Were they able to organize a way to make the transitions and sustain play? Were they maintaining focal attention, building up their interactions with each other? Were they picking up and responding to each other’s affective signals? “The terms that capture the different qualities of the family alliances are cooperation, stress, collusion, and disorder” (p. 9). In cooperation, liveliness and grace prevail over adversity with well contoured, mutually enjoyed play (Katie’s family would be an example). When a marked difference in parental styles or an infant’s reluctance to engage made the goal of play difficult to achieve, the stressed alliance led to awkward communication, but the obstacles to organizing play would be overcome by the triad. With the triads who formed collusive alliances, conflicts between the parents led them to compete with each other for dominance and for the infant’s attention. (Sonya’s divorced parents in chapter 6 may be an example of placing unnegotiated parental conflict on the child.) Overt hostile interruption of the other or covert seductiveness by collusive parents led to a fragmented, frequently interrupted line of play (Mrs. S in chapter 7 was raised in this type of family system).

In the more seriously disrupted family system, attempts of the parents to elicit play and make transitions are confused. Approaches may be arbitrarily withdrawn or a participant excluded. Play is rigidified or disconnected. Affect is negative and no recovery of the goal of play occurs (Harry in chapter 5).

Observations of body, eye, and facial movements provide an insight into the process of communication within a triad. Effective transitions are brought about when readiness for a change of state is first preannounced nonverbally by a participant and then announced both nonverbally and verbally. The change is ratified by the others leading to a deconstruction of the state. The reconstruction that follows may leave a participant miscoordinated to the goals. Further reconstruction is required to repair the mis-coordination and the formation of a new intact state.

The findings of this study of the triangular family system augments the extensive knowledge we have of dyadic communication. The study also moves from the attachment experimental design aimed at examining the dyad under conditions of danger and loss to understanding the triad as instituting moments of play. Correlations between attachment issues and triadic communication are speculative but inviting. Empathic sensitivity to others and to the self can be expected to facilitate both secure attachment in the dyad and cooperative alliance in the triad. Alternatively, communicative patterns of dismissive, avoidant, or anxious resistant preoccupation on the part of one or both parents increase the probability of a stressed or collusive alliance. Parental inclination, moreover, to moments of disorganization or dissociative dyadic communication under stress can be expected to contribute to unrepaired miscoordinations in a triadic goal.

The authors postulate that the patterns of nonverbal communication the infant forms in the triad will have a lasting effect. Whereas attachment research with over 25 years of well-documented findings demonstrates the probability of a lifelong effect on preverbal communicative patterns, triadic research as yet can demonstrate findings of continuity only for the first year. Nonetheless the family triangle study makes a promising beginning of opening family intercommunication to a well constructed research inquiry. Additionally, the categories of cooperative, stressed, collusive, and disorganized alliances strike a resonant note with clinical observations.

The Subjectivity Aware Sense of Self in an Intersubjective Matrix 9 to 15 Months

From day one, infants exist in an intersubjective matrix of dyads and triads influenced by and influencing the affective messages that pass back and forth within it. At about nine months, infants look to their caregivers’ faces for explicit information about the caregivers’ affective state and the guidance it provides. Affects again lead the way to the infant’s double awareness. First, “I can be forewarned of danger or safety, of what to look at or what to avoid, when she is ready or when she is not.” Second, “I can match my affect with hers, making me implicitly aware that I too have identifiable affects.” Infants thereby take two big steps into the human world. First, guiding information is being communicated all the time through affect and this guidance can be sought. Second, a common bond, a form of fundamental twinship, exists in that all humans have similar feelings, and this commonality can be actively sought for confirmation or disconfirmation.

At the same time as affect checking begins, another change in information exchange is heralded by the pointing finger. For the younger infant, a parent’s pointing finger is simply a passing source of interest to be looked at or grasped. Now the pointing finger becomes a directional signal for gaze focus. Older infants follow the finger, creating a line of gaze from their mother’s eye to finger to an object or person at a distance. And infants use the same signal to alert others to their desire. In Stern’s (1983) words, “Infants come upon the momentous realization that inner subjective experiences, the subject matter of the mind, are potentially shareable with someone else” (p. 128).

Seeking facial affective expressions and directional signals ushers in a new model of communication for infants. Previously, affect and gesture operated in a nonlinear fashion akin to the manner in which dance partners give bodily indications to each other of the flow of their movement. The coordination involves a trajectory. Stern has described the communication of affect to involve not only a recognition of the category (anger, joy, fear, etc.) but the rise or fall of affect insensity. Similarly, arousal is heightened (alertness) or lessened (boredom or drowsiness). These trajectories are what infant and mother learn to recognize in each other. Examples of this mode of communication in later life are a quarterback’s “read” of a receiver’s trajectory to connect on a pass or a boxer’s counterpunch, which, to be effective, must anticipate the other boxer’s blow before it begins as an actual movement. In the period in which the core sense of self develops, communication is asymmetrical. The infant’s contribution is affect and gesture and in face-to-face communication, a coordination of timing of active facial expression and limb movements and pauses. The mother’s contribution involves the use of three modes of communication: (1) the same coordinated timing of facial expression activity and pause; (2), the recognition of the baby’s affect and gesture as signs signalling changes in state and motivational needs; and (3), the symbolic meaning of their immediate interplay stated in affective words and the deeper symbolism of their essential relational connection. The asymmetry can be stated in another way. Prior to 9 or 10 months infants begin to experience agency in communication as they activate expressions, vocalizings, and gestures. After 9 to 10 months the sense of agency is augmented by an increasing sense of intention as evidenced by intentional checking of mother’s facial expression and the infant’s pointing toward a desired object. Mother’s agency and intentionality are integrated and organized through symbolic goals evidenced by the mother’s inner monologue-dialogue, her spoken speech and her capacity for reflective awareness about her feelings and attitudes as they play out in her contacts and exchanges with her baby.

A fresh look at “stranger anxiety” (Spitz, 1965) through the lens of affective communication reveals an alternative explanation to that of the dawning capacity to differentiate the maternal representation. This previously offered explanation has been rendered unsatisfactory by evidence of the infant’s discrimination of mother from strangers long before 10 months of age. At 9½ months, Becca is taken to visit her grandmother. Her mother carefully introduces Becca to her new surroundings and, by the second day of the visit, the mother is out of the room when the grandmother enters with a stranger. Becca, who has just begun to stand, is noisily pulling herself up and down, using the sides of her crib. She interrupts her activity to glance first at her grandmother and then at the stranger. In a fast-paced sequence, her face goes from a flicker of a smile of greeting at her grandmother, to a look of apprehension as she glances past her grandmother at the stranger, to a look of fear and a decomposing of her fearful look into crying at a full glance at the stranger. Becca’s mother, hearing her cry, calls to her from the hall. Becca stops crying and, by the time her mother approaches her, she is pulling up in a standing position with a beaming smile. Placed on her mother’s lap, Becca ignores the stranger and plays a familiar game with her mother’s earrings. She gives the stranger a few fleeting glances. Finally, her curiosity seems to win out over her apprehension; she reaches out to the stranger to inspect her necklace and then her face. Yet she positions her body so that she remains in or very near physical contact with her mother. As she moves toward the stranger, she glances back three different times, seemingly to inspect her mother’s face. Her mother senses this as a request for reassurance and responds with encouragement.

Becca at 9 to 10 months reacts differently to the stranger than she would have earlier. At four months (Jaffe et al., 1999) conversational runs with a stranger add a mix of novelty, stress, and challenge comparable to the infant’s being in a laboratory as compared to home. Especially for securely attached infants, this novelty triggers no fear. Even with less securely attached children, a stranger can elicit a conversational run but may have to work harder at it. Now at 9½ months Becca, a securely attached child, decomposed rapidly from apprehension to fear and crying. The explanation that seems most plausible evolves from the new advance of looking to mother’s familiar facial expression for an indication of safety or danger. This advance provides developing infants and toddlers an important orienting resource in navigating their way. What is newly strange about the “stranger” is that she is someone whose facial expression the infant cannot read. Extrapolated to culture, a source of the metaphor long used by Americans to refer to Asians as “inscrutable” lies in the formers’ inability to use quickly an Asian’s face for a safety providing orientation.

Returning to sign-signal communication, infants and toddlers look to their mother’s face and body language to read a sign that signals both shared affect and orienting direction. Infants becoming excited look to mother to join in, whereas infants becoming frightened look to mother for confirmation of danger or reassurance of safety.

Not only the toddler’s pointed finger but also vocalizing with grunts and, increasingly, words convey desire and its intensity. Agency and intention and increased mobility introduce to parents and toddler an inevitable series of conflicting agendas. To this often inflammatory mix is added what Spitz (1957) called the head-shaking NO! The gestural “no,” with or without a vocalized word, communicates the toddler’s emergent sense of the power of intention-driven opposition. Toddlers during this phase are not using “no” as a symbol stating in condensed form the sentence—“No, I do not want to play with this toy”—because they may then take the toy and play with it. They will say “No” not only to a food they don’t prefer but to their favorite food as well. As toddlers suddenly discover they possess the power of a traffic red light or a stop sign, they want and need to practice its use to have available throughout life the capacity to signal refusal. A ubiquitous consequence is that parents and toddler are regularly immersed in communicative exchanges about signals of do and don’t do, expressed through varying degrees of playfulness, conning, cooperating, and antagonistic opposition. As a background to these agenda struggles, parents are pulled between responding to the child’s often confusing initiatives and attending to other concerns of their own.

Attachment at One Year and Its Intersubjective Communication

Findings derived from the Strange Situation Test and the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) (Main, 2000) indicate the lived experiences of parent and child at one year. Based on subjecting toddlers to a controlled danger of a mother’s departure from a play area and the presence of a stranger, four patterns of response have been categorized. Using an interview structured to focus on an adult’s memory of his or her attachment experiences, four categories have been found that have a high probability of indicating what pattern of attachment the adult had formed at one year and the mode of attachment that the adult’s offspring is likely to form with her or him.

Katie would fall into the category of 60% of toddlers who reveal patterns of secure attachment. They run to their parent, who responds to their distress and their appeal to be picked up, comforted, and then sensitively assisted to return to play with toys. Parents, such as Katie’s, are identifiable by the AAI as “autonomous.” By virtue of their own early secure attachment or later evolved capacity, “autonomous” adults confidently look to themselves for much of their security and to others when needed. As parents they demonstrate a capacity for reflective observation during their caregiving, play, spontaneous chatter, and informational exchanges.

To explicate the communicative aspect of the intersubjective world these parents and children co-create, we have attempted to put into words the communicative effect of the mixed linear and nonlinear nature of their exchanges. We see the message to be: “There is a you that I have come to know and there is a me you have come to know. We think well of each other. You have the space to be you with your needs and feelings, and I have the space to be me with my needs and feelings. I attend to you lovingly but neither dominate you nor let you dominate me. I try to attune my responses to your signs of hunger, thirst, being chilled or overheated, elimination, sleepiness, awakeness, playfulness, need for tactile and proprioceptive activity, hugging, and rocking. I try to sense when you are in distress and need me, or have had enough of me and want to be left alone to explore. Together you and I are establishing an intersubjective field in which my intuitive sense of you lets me track you and help you to track me. When I sense you are ready to take a step forward, I mirror it and share with you the joy of it and your appreciation (idealization) of me.”

Ten percent of toddlers also run to their mothers. When picked up they push away rather than cling, and when put down they demand to be picked back up. These children have developed this unrewarding strategy in response to their parent’s unpredictable oscillations between acceptance and angry rejection. In situations of danger or distress these toddlers combine anxious seeking with angry resistance. Parents whose own attachment was anxious-resistant will convey to their infant the carryover of their preoccupation with an unresolved struggle with their parents. In their care and chatter they communicate that at moments they can be sensitively concerned but that at other moments their feeling of fear, distress, anger, shame, or inadequacy will predominate. The message for the child is: “At times your mental state can be free to reflect your needs and feelings, but at especially critical times, my concerns about myself will lead me to fill your mind with my needs and troubled feelings.” These children become unconsciously organized to be hypersensitive to their parent’s aversive states. Many of these children, especially when their altruistic potential comes to the fore around the age of two (Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow, 1982), begin a lifelong pattern of preoccupied and often self-depleting caregiving to a parent and then others. The role reversal between child and parent may involve the parent’s being dominated or infantilized. Other anxious-resistant children follow a pattern of seeking care but never getting enough. Their neediness frequently triggers aversive responses in others, leading the careseeker to affect states of shame, angry protest, and hurt withdrawal.

Twenty percent of toddlers do not approach their mothers on their return. Instead they seem to ignore both her departure and return. They focus on toys or actively move away. These children have experienced their mother as rejecting, threateningly intrusive, or, at the least, unavailable to satisfy the child’s needs for security.

Parents who in their own attachments had an avoidant strategy to preserve what they could of contact with their caregiver will convey to their child that they have little intuitive potential for affective warmth and sensual closeness. In dialogue exchanges with their baby, avoidant parents are not apt to track in the midrange. In their broader response interactions, they may communicate an affectless devotion to duty and little sensitivity to distress and other messages the child sends. Kierra and her mother are examples. For the child the parent’s message becomes: I recognize neither my nor your dependency needs. You had best empty your mind of recognition of your dependent wishes toward me. Furthermore, your protests about not having those needs and wishes responded to had best be suppressed too.” These children, while appearing to be indifferent to their parent’s activity, are actually experiencing considerable stress as evidenced by heightened cortisol levels. They become anxious hypervigilant observers calculating the range of physical and emotional closeness to, or distance from, their mothers that they need to maintain. Suppressing both their wishes for closeness and their hurt and anger at their rejection, their sense of self alone or with others becomes constricted and arid.

Ten percent of toddlers evince responses that signify the absence of a coherent strategy of behavioral or emotional organization (Hesse and Main, 2000). They may begin to move toward the returning mother appearing distressed, then stop, turn away, fall down, or freeze. They may go rapidly from distress to detachment with a trancelike facial expression. They may display odd stereotypic gestures. Many of these children have suffered direct abuse from their parents. Others have not been overtly maltreated but have been subjected to mothers who are frightened and/or frightening. For these children a move toward closeness arouses the fear of being frightened rather than comforted, while moving away means loss and abandonment at a moment of need. Action is paralyzed and the resulting affect state is chaotic. Their sense of self vacillates between high levels of anxiety and the dissociative cutting off of emotions.

Parents whose own childhood experiences left them vulnerable to disorganized affect states, disorientation at times of stress, and dissociative lapses will convey to their infants the fallout of their own chaotic sense of self. Their talk to their child will communicate the unpredictability of their concern; expressions of concern will alternate with sudden bursts of anger, abuse, or fright. The parent’s unpredictable affective storms are made even more problematic for the child to orient to by the equally unpredictable lapses of the parent’s attention into a state of detachment and dissociation. For the child, the parent’s message becomes: “I cannot maintain my own self as consistently or purposefully organized. Whatever empathy I feel for myself or for you can be lost in a split second without any way for either of us to track the origins. I may be with you one minute, scaring you and myself the next, and off in a detached reverie the next.” These children become hypervigilant to the world around them with fearful expectations. Their sense of self reflects many aspects of a chaotic fear that they will erupt and that others will erupt, or both, and that the boundaries between self and other will be obliterated. Signals of the danger of affective or aggressive eruption from self and/or other may trigger dissociation, while the absence of a relational connection may lead to a hunger for high-tension interactions of a provocative or sexual nature.

In instances of direct abuse or serious neglect, the message is: “You and your body are a dehumanized object to be subjected to unpredictable assault or abandonment.” In the case of children being frightened by a caregiver who is angry or in states of panic or unreachable by virtue of being detached, drugged or dissociated, the message is: “Your emotional and bodily needs are insignificant in comparison to the distress dominating your mother’s life.” The child suffers the loss of a sense of coordination between body movement and intent, an asynchrony of the ordinary approach dance with mother at times of need. Play and the affect of playfulness (Meares, 1993; Lichtenberg and Meares, 1996) may be sacrificed. In addition, since the child can’t establish a contingent relationship to the parent’s unpredictable changes of affective-cognitive state, the child’s long-term development of cognitive acuity and reflective capacity is often severely compromised (as with borderline patients).