The Clinical Infant

While the clinical infant is not a real person, it is a theoretical construction of a number of persons and in many ways is the most important "person" of The Interpersonal World of the Infant. Early in the book, Stern sets up a contrast between the two central theoretical constructs of two fundamentally distinct perspectives on infant psychology - the developmental psychologist's perspective and the psychoanalysts' perspective. Stern worked as both a clinician and a developmentalist and seeks to unify the two perspectives.

However, Stern is not primarily interested in doing original research by observing infants. Instead, he seeks to employ information gathered by infant observation to shape, deepen and correct the perspective represented by the clinical infant. The clinical infant is the theoretical construct employed by clinicians or psychoanalysts. It tends to understand infant psychology and subjective experience in terms of macro-level psychological principles. Traditional...