Co-constructing inner and relational processes: Self and mutual regulation in infant research and adult treatment

In the current climate of theoretical change, psychoanalysis is seeking a theory of interaction. We propose that principles of interactive organization documented in infant research have analogues in adult treatment. A systems model of the integration of self and mutual regulation is used to draw analogies, but not one-to-one correspondences, between infant research and adult psychoanalysis. We specifically address how self and mutual regulation impact on each other, arguing that internal and relational processes are simultaneously organized, in relation to each other, at all developmental levels. Co-constructing inner and relational processes: Self and mutual regulation in infant research and adult treatment Psychoanalysis has tended to privilege inner state as the focus of inquiry. Freud (l923) argued that perceptions of what goes on in the environment are never as important as those arising from within; that internal perceptions are more primordial, more elementary than perceptions arising externally, and that they have greater economic significance. Perceptions of the outer world are often seen as distorted through projections of the inner state. Instead, we suggest that the "inner" and the "outer" worlds are co-constructed, and thus are not separate domains. We distinguish between the two domains, but see them as fundamentally coordinated. By not privileging "inner" or "outer", and by emphasizing their reciprocal coconstruction, we examine how dyadic process may (re-) organize both inner and relational processes, and reciprocally, how changes in self-regulation in either partner may alter the interactive process. In the past decade, efforts at conceptualizing systems views have been evident in both infant research and psychoanalysis. Each field, however, has come from the opposite bias. Heavily preoccupied with interactive regulation in the dyad, infant research on social development is only now seriously examining self regulation (see Tronick, 1989; Fox, 1994; Thompson, 1994). Similarly, psychoanalysis originally explicated the organization of inner states, and has only more recently seriously examined interaction in the dyad. Current versions of systems thinking conceptualizing interaction in psychoanalysis can be found, for example, in Stolorow, Atwood, and Brandschaft's (1987) intersubjectivity, Mitchell's (1988) relational psychoanalysis, Hoffman’s (1983) and Gill's (1994) constructivist views, Aron's (1996) mutuality, Lichtenberg's (1989; Lichtenberg, Lachmann, & Fosshage, 1992) placement of five motivational systems within a mutual regulation model, Benjamin's (1988;1990) intersubjectivity, Ehrenberg's (1994) intimate edge, and Beebe, Jaffe, and Lachmann's (1992) dyadic systems model. These theorists all have in common the attempt to refine conceptualizations of psychoanalytic interaction. Systems thinking has also been implicit in much twentieth century psychoanalysis. For example, Ferenczi (1928), Balint (1968),