ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some early interactions between mother and baby and their potential significance for later development. Many of these early interactions involve the face, which in later life is often felt to have a special connection with the self or person. The baby’s smile elicits a smile from the mother, and this in turn reinforces and promotes the infant’s smiling. Human attachment behaviour is thus mutually reinforcing and mutually interdependent. The research shows that what goes on between mother and baby is highly specific for any particular mother–infant pair. From the beginning, the baby is immersed in a medium of preverbal ‘conversation’ with mother and almost certainly depends on this aspect of the mother at least as much as on her purely physical care. Communication between mother and baby lies at the heart of his formulations, and the infant’s relation to the mother’s face as mirror to himself provides the subject of one of his most important papers.
