Perspective

Daniel Stern's most prominent work is The Interpersonal World of the Infant. Born in 1934 in New York City, Stern is one of the most prominent developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts. He specializes in infant development and at the present date has spent more than thirty years studying infants in observation and through clinical work. He is most well-known for his theory of child-mother bonding and the Self Psychology advanced in The Interpersonal World of the Infant.

Stern's perspective in the book is comprised of his major thesis. His first major emphasis is that the subjective experience of the infant is best made sense of through employing senses of the self as unifying elements of experience across the infant's varied sensory modalities. Each stage of the sense of self unifies more and more complex forms of experience. Stern argues therefore that senses of the self extend far back into infancy...