Should We Be Stern With Daniel Stern? A Personal Appraisal of Daniel Stern's Book The Interpersonal World of the Infant'

Abstract

SUMMARY Daniel Stern's book The Interpersonal World of the Infant is reviewed with some detail paid to his notion of the sequential unfolding of the subjective experience of self during infancy. He denotes this sequence as the Senses of the Self and they include the Sense of an Emergent Self (birth-2 months of age); Sense of Core Self (2–6 months); Sense of Subjective Self (7–15 months); Sense of a Verbal Self (15 months on). A critical evaluation of Stem's conclusions is offered - several issues which the author feels are valuable contributions to our growing understanding of infancy, and several which illuminate, in the author's opinion, the unavoidable element in research that the researcher is influenced by his own “basic truths”, in this instance the legacy of the American ego-psychologic tradition.