ABSTRACT
The last chapter drew on the thought of Elias and Mead to explore the nature of human communicative interaction and suggested the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating. This chapter interprets, from a complex responsive process perspective, the work of Stern (1985, 1995) on child development and the emergence of self. Stern's two in¯uential books present detailed ®ndings on infant development, partly interpreted from a psychoanalytic perspective and partly from a social perspective. However, his ®ndings also provide considerable support for the complex responsive processes perspective, describing in detail as they do the `conversation of gestures' in which an infant's identity emerges.
