Pre-Object Relatedness: Early Attachment and the Psychoanalytic Situation

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Summary: From "Contemporary Psychoanalysis" May 1999
Review: "...clinically useful....there are moments in this book...when one is actually stopped in one's conceptual tracks by a particularly apt insight." [Note: no numerical rating in review]

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Summary: "Erudite"
Review: "...undertakes the seemingly impossible task of describing pre-verbal infant communication....an important book." --Rose Boyarsky, St. Louis, in "Psychotherapy in Private Practice" [Note: no numerical rating in review]

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Summary: A penetrating look into the affect and attachment of babies.
Review: I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, but I learned a tremendous amount from this book. The author makes the ideas of projective- and introjective identification very clear. It was fascinating to learn that a baby's distress call, and the way it is responded to by the parent, becomes the model for the child and later adult to manage his or her own anxiety. As a father of a 16 month-old daughter, it helps me understand how my parenting, and empathetic answering my daughter's needs, contribute profoundly to her current and future mental health. I didn't need the advice to psychotherapists, but found it interesting. I feel that reading Charles Brenner's book, A Textbook of Psychoanalysis (I think that is the title), before this one, would be helpful to novices like myself to understand better the concepts in the book.