Beatrice Beebe - Forms of Intersubjectivity in infant research

Additional Praise for

Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment

Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment is an outstanding achievement. Not only does it bring clarity to the confusing array of meanings attaching to the term intersubjectivity in the discourse of contemporary psychoanalysis and infant research. This alone would be a singular contribution, but the book does so much more. In forging important links among the fields of psychoanalytic theory, developmental research, and therapeutic practice, it offers a comprehensive and integrated view of human interaction that will be invaluable to clinicians and academics alike.

Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., coauthor, Worlds of Experience

The authors have provided a thorough, clarifying, and immensely useful discussion of the research and conceptual attempts to model the forms of intersubjective processes occurring between infants and caregivers, enlarging and deepening the issues. The usefulness of these ideas for clinicians, namely the importance of attending to implicit as well as to explicit processing, is brilliantly demonstrated through a remarkable ten-year treatment of an adult woman presented by Beebe. This is an important bookbreaking new ground in research methods, in theory building, and in therapeutic techniques!

E. Virginia Demos, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School

I would recommend this volume on intersubjectivity to psychotherapists of all schools. Not only will it allow them to upgrade their theories about psychotherapist/patient interaction, it uses clear concepts and language to provide them with an extensive review of the literature on clinical and experimental studies of how psychoanalytic psychotherapies operate, and how patients can be helped. Clinical vignettes demonstrate how verbal and bodily, cognitive and emotional dimensions are combined to form a particularly clear vision of what is being experienced and enacted at each moment. One of the originalities of this model is the imaginative way in which a relation is perceived as a combination of interactive and auto-regulative strategies. Finally, this volume contains original and imaginative theoretical and practical suggestions about effectively combining scholarship and love in order to help wounded souls.

Michael Coster Heller, Ph.D., editor of The Flesh of the Soul

Moving their video camera from the studies of caretaker-infant interactions to the broad field of intersubjectivity, Beebe, Knoblauch, Rustin, and Sorter utilize dyadic systems theory as a panorama that integrates verbal and nonverbal, implicit and explicit dimensions of interactions. In a clear, eminently readable and concise manner, comparisons of five theories of intersubjectivity in adult treatment (Benjamin, Ehrenberg, Jacobs, Ogden, Stolorow) are explicated and enhanced with diagrams that emphasize similarities and differences among theorists. Close-ups of the work of three theorists of intersubjectivity (Meltzoff, Stern, Trevarthen) in infant research address their similarities and differences, focusing on the concepts of matching, the role of self-regulation, and the balance between self- and interactive regulation. The final section consists of a microanalytic description of Beebes treatment of a fragile, traumatized woman. Beebe videotaped her own face during portions of this treatment so that the patient, unable to look at her at times during sessions, and later unable to see her in continued telephone sessions, could process her experience of the sessions under less pressure. The detailed discussions of this treatment makes not only for compelling reading but provides a model for a creative, yet rigorously disciplined treatment approach. The relevance of attending to nonverbal communication and forms of intersubjectivity from infant research are carefully documented in this adult treatment case. Discussions by Theodore Jacobs and Regina Pally provide additional perspectives on this exciting and rich material.

Frank M. Lachmann, Ph.D., author of Transforming Aggression: Psychotherapy with the Difficult-to-Treat Patient

Permission to reprint chapters from Psychoanalytic Dialogues Part 1: 13 (6): 743841, 2003; Part II: 14 (1): 151, 2004 is gratefully acknowledged. Reprinted by permission of the Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ.

Copyright 2005 Beatrice Beebe, Steven Knoblauch, Judith Rustin, Dorienne Sorter, Theodore J. Jacobs, and Regina Pally

Production Editor: Mira S. Park

Ebook ISBN9781635421156

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Forms of intersubjectivity in infant research and adult treatment / Beatrice Beebe[et al.].

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59051-151-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Psychotherapist and patient. 2. Intersubjectivity. 3. Psychotherapy. I. Beebe, Beatrice,

1946

RC480.8.F67 2005

616.8914dc22

2005012813

a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

Dedication

To Ruth and Gilbert Beebe

Edward McCrorie

and

Dolores

To Ingrid Roze and Giana Knoblauch

To Herb and Cara Rabin

To George Sorter