The Clinical Dimension of Baby Games

Abstract

Our longitudinal studies of infants from birth included interpersonal as an area in which reciprocity between the and his partners could be examined in fine detail. Observations of were recorded, along with all other data, in descriptive narratives by the observers in their twice-monthly home visits. Oncemonthly film documentation also included sequences. The included a large number of the traditional nursery and a number of which appeared to have no tradition and were inventions of the parents themselves. It was not until I completed the data sorting and constructed individual profiles for a study of human attachments that a story emerged. I then saw that there was a remarkable correspondence between the characteristics of the invented and the characteristics of parent-child interaction derived from all other observations in the area of human attachment. In many cases the conflictual elements in the parents' relationship to the infant, the defenses or the failure of defenses against negative and forbidden impulses, could be read as fairly through the profile as through the human attachment profile derived from all other sources of study. This is not to say, of course, that the provided as much information as the larger study, but rather that the were equivalent, in some ways, to a projective test in revealing the main lines of harmony and conflict in parent-child relationships. The children are blind, but our findings should not be interpreted as blind and parent games, rather as baby games in which parents at play reveal to the clinician some aspects of their conflicted parenthood. We can read the adaptive defenses