ABSTRACT
Finding detailed observations of mother±infant interactions in the literature of child development research was surprisingly dif®cult, even though research on the capacity of infants to interact continues to increase. The original paper by Brazelton incorporates examples, as do other older papers, when microanalysis of ®lmed interactions began. However, most recent papers now refer to microanalysis as an accepted research method and do not include any of the original observations. For instance, an examination of the past three years (2000±3) of the Infant Mental Health Journal yields only Beebe's work as including examples and an examination of two years (2001±2) of Infancy, the Journal of the International Society of Infant Studies yielded no examples, even though many researchers are using microanalysis in their research. They tend to refer only brie¯y to the methodology, perhaps because it is so prevalent now, and to present aggregated results rather than a detailed description of an interaction, which is required in order for the data to be interrogated. Examples have therefore had to be found in older work, in contrast to the previous section on examining examples from psychoanalytic publications that have been published within the past ®ve years. Even older literature presents aggregated data. For example, in the 1987 version of the Handbook of Infant Development (Osofsky, 1987), none of the chapters that include analysis of parent±infant interactions gives any examples in prose, apart from one very brief example from Papousek, which is referred to later.
