We invite you to the second session of "Thinking Here and Now" in which we will speak with New York infant researcher and analyst Beatrice Beebe. The conversation will discuss Beebe's new discoveries about early mother-child interactions, the special research methods she has developed, and the implications of her research findings for adult treatment. The findings will be illustrated through films and clinical examples.

Beatrice Beebe is a world-renowned clinical psychologist who studies nonverbal interaction between parents and infants and the impact of this interaction on adult therapy. Throughout her many years of research, Beebe has argued that the roots of all our relationships are to be found in the communication between parents and infants and that this influences the patterns of interaction in adult life. This does not mean that the developmental trajectory cannot be changed, or that other factors do not change it. However, Beebe believes that the important influence of these interactions has been neglected by psychoanalysis. In her opinion, this is a powerful, non-linear developmental trajectory that occurs at great speed and remains outside of awareness. At the same time that the therapist and the patient are talking, their bodies are responding to and influencing each other, creating and establishing a deep and unconscious dynamic.

Bibi first became famous for her videotaped interactions between mothers and infants during their first year of life. She used microanalysis to analyze mother-infant interaction. She tracks the facial expressions of mother and infant over very short time windows and shows how each side of the dyad influences the other, changing in the same way, and in the same emotional direction.

Bibi investigates the implications of parent-infant interactions for adult therapy. Bibi argues that since the shadows of early interactional disturbances resurface in therapy, infant research can help us become more aware of the kinds of maladjustments to which the patient may be sensitive without realizing it. Through infant research, for example, we can become more aware of the specific ways in which difficult, inaccessible patients express deep longings for connection and close contact.

One of Beatriz Bibi's famous cases is that of Dolores. Dolores, who lost her mother as a child, was hungry for touch and connection, and the therapy aroused these longings. Her unconscious wish was to get to know herself through her reflection in the therapist's face. But Dolores did not make eye contact, her face was devoid of emotion, and she was often silent. But Bibi recognized that despite deep fears of intimacy and closeness, a tendency to withdraw into herself, she yearned for close contact. Since Dolores did not make eye contact with Bibi, Bibi offered her an unusual intervention: she filmed the facial expressions of the two of them responding to each other and showed Dolores photographs of Bibi's face, so that Dolores could see how she was reflected in Bibi's face. Thus, progress in this unconventional therapy occurred through a "dialogue in action" made possible through the videos.

Recommended books:

• Infant research and psychoanalysis (Editor: Giuseppe Leo, 2018)

• The Mother-Infant Interaction Picture Book: Origins of Attachment (2016)

• The Origins of Attachment (with Frank Lachmann). (2013)

• Infant Research and adult treatment (with Frank Lachmann) (2002)