'This book is essential reading for everyone interested in psychoanalysis and for every therapist who has the responsibility for helping a patient to understand and alter his or her life.'- Arnold M. Cooper, M.D., The New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center'Dan Stern - scientist, psychoanalyst, and first-rate science writer - takes us on an enchanted journey to those magical years when the sense of self emerges. He puts subjectivity and intersubjectivity where they belong, at the center of psychological inquiry. On the way, he synthesizes a bold new theory outlining an emergent self, a core self, a subjective self, and a verbal self, and relates this theory to important therapeutic questions. This is a landmark volume that is essential reading for clinicians, researchers and anyone else interested in an original and provocative perspective on human development.'- Ethel Person, M.D., Columbia University'This enormously important book explores in rich and fascinating detail the relationships between the psychoanalytic and the experimental traditions. What emerges is not merely a piecing together of insights but a radically new and fresh way of looking at the social and emotional world of infants. We have here the core of a powerful new theory that can inform our understanding for years to come. The book blends the subtlety of observation with the rigor of experimentation and excites the reader at almost every page.'- Joseph Glick, Ph.D., Graduate Center, City University of New York'An important book by a leading clinician and researcher. Daniel Stern combines a clinical and experimental approach in exploring whether early experience is critical in setting the stage for optimal development or in endangering the child's future. And in doing this he brings up-to-date the threads of thinking in infancy research, psychoanalysis, and child development.'- T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., Harvard Medical School'As both a clinician and an imaginative researcher with infants and mothers, Daniel Stern has been in the forefront of these advances. His splendid book will be welcomed by every thinking clinician.'- John Bowlby M.D.