The Interpersonal World of the Infant
| Author | Daniel Stern |
|---|---|
| Subject | Developmental psychology |
| Publisher | Basic Books |
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Publication date
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1985 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 45430229 |
The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985) is one of the most prominent works of psychoanalyst Daniel N. Stern, in which he describes the development of four interrelated senses of self. These senses of self develop over the lifespan, but make significant developmental strides during sensitive periods in the first two years of life. The mother or other primary attachment figure plays a critical role in helping the infant with this developmental process.
At birth, the infant experiences the world as a barrage of seemingly unrelated sensory stimuli, which s/he gradually learns to "yoke" together using cues such as "hedonic tone" (emotional quality), and temporal and intensity patterns shared between stimuli. This process of integrating and organizing experience, called the emergent sense of self, continues until about two months. It serves as "the basis for the child's ability to learn and create," and is what Stern believes is the sense of self that is disrupted in the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.
Around two months, the child's organization of sensory experience reaches a point where s/he is able to sufficiently organize experience to have integrated episodic memories. This enables a higher level of sophistication organizing future experiences, as the child is able to discern discrete invariant objects from cross-modal sensory stimuli and to use these to arrive at generalizations about what s/he can expect in the future from his/her environment. In this process, the infant also becomes aware of its own features ("self-invariants"), which give the child its sense of core self as an entity distinct from other objects in its environment.
The child also develops generalized representations of its interactions with its primary caregiver during this time, a concept related to and informed by attachment theory. The child learns whether it can depend on its caregiver to provide for its needs and the types of affective and behavioral responses it can expect in specific situations, which serve as the basis for its future attachment style. An important role of the caregiver during this time is to assist the child in regulating its affect. Eventually, if all goes well, the child will internalize these experiences with the primary attachment figure and be able to invoke these memories to help herself self-regulate her affect. Stern believes that ruptures during this phase of development result in borderline pathology.
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