One way to build a clinically relevant baby

Abstract

This article explores how an infant might represent object-related, interpersonal experience. To be clinically relevant, our exploration is limited to goal-directed, motivated behavior. We propose that motives—as enacted and subjectively experienced—result in a unit of ongoing subjective experience called an “emergent moment.” We suggest that such “moments” are represented in at least six separate, parallel, basic schematic formats: sensorimotor schemas; perceptions; concepts; scripts; “temporal feeling shapes”; and “protonarrative envelopes.” The temporal feeling shape is proposed as a format for representing affects. And the protonarrative envelope is proposed as a format for representing the global experience in a narrative-like form. All six schematic formats, taken together, comprise a network of schemas that we call the “schema-of-being-with.”. An extended clinical example is given of the different “schemas-of-being-with-a-depressed-mother” that generally form and become clinically important parts of the infant's representational world.

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