ABSTRACT
Designed and developed primarily within the context of making naturalistic observations of child and parent, the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP) offers special "windows" (Stern, 1985) or "ports of entry" (Stern, 1995) into the clinical infant-parent dyad. The KMP does so both as a methodologic instrument for classifying observations of nonverbal behavior and as a conceptual frame within which to address the nonverbal patterns of attunement, clashing, matching, and mismatching, along with patterns contributing to and reflective of reciprocity, mutuality, harmony, sensitivity, and attachment that have become elemental constructs for the infant-parent psychotherapist. The KMP offers a language of description that, in turn, promotes developmental appraisal and lends itself to the task of treatment planning by informing the therapist of the interactive repertoire of both parent and infant.
