The infant: Stern and Tronick

Regulation is joint before it is individual, and the interior is built from the outside in.

What they observed

Edward Tronick and colleagues devised the still-face procedure (1978): a mother stops responding to her infant while continuing to look at it. Nothing is removed but her live response, and within a minute or two the infant's attention, affect and posture begin to disorganize. His later work described ordinary interaction as mutual regulation (1989): most of an infant's regulation of arousal and affect is accomplished in the exchange, not in either partner, and the still face removes one party from a process that requires two.

Daniel Stern, a psychoanalyst who turned to the direct observation of infants, described affect attunement (1985). From about the ninth month, parents answer the dynamic shape of an infant's expression, its intensity, timing and contour, in another modality, many times an hour and largely without awareness. On his account, this is how an infant comes to know that it has an inner life that can be shared. The sense of a private interior is constructed in the second half of the first year, out of these matchings.

What it shows

If the self were originally sealed, the seal should be most intact at the origin. Infant research found that it has not yet been drawn. The separate self that the analysts found so hard to keep in place was never the original condition. It is a construction, raised on a connection that the construction does not abolish.

In the model

The paper places the formation of an address here. An infant whose environment can receive distress but not exuberance, or achievement but not need, stabilizes a selection fitted to what the environment could support. The valve consolidates inside the exclusions of the fields that enclose it, so an address is inherited before it is lived.