ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate a research program designed and carried out as a way to study the infant and its caregiving environment together as a living biological system. There are at least three reasons that this account has relevance to this volume. The first is that psychoanalysis, in its current concern with the argument that a “self-psychology within psychoanalysis” (Kohut, 1977) is needed, is turning once again, as it has from its very outset, to both biology and early development for light on the matter of the ontogeny of behavioral and psychological organization (e.g., Basch, 1977). Psychoanalysis needs the conceptual and empirical perspective that recent advances in biological systems research are opening up.
