The Interpersonal Words of the Infant: Implications of Current Infant Language Research for Psychoanalytic Theories of Infant Development, Language, and Therapeutic Action

Abstract

Daniel Stern’s The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985) revolutionized psychoanalytic thinking about both infant development and therapeutic work with adults. An enduring legacy of Stern’s opus is the belief that language plays a minor role in infant development. By contrast, recent research demonstrates that infants use others’ spoken words to understand their interpersonal experiences beginning in the first year of life. Indeed, word meanings emerge from lived experiences. The research compels us to think anew about the connectedness of lived experiences and the words of language, and has implications for understanding both infant development and therapeutic action.

Keywords:

• Language
• idiolect
• infant development
• infant research
• therapeutic action

Notes

1 Cultural patterns of relatedness are an important source of variability in language learning and use, and as such are likely to imbue the clinical situation. Examination of these cultural patterns is beyond the scope of the present work, however.

2 “Parent” here refers to any adult in a primary parental or caretaking relationship with the infant.