Child development and early triadic relationships

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Updated: Oct 23, 2026

A Novel Experimental and Analytical Approach to the Multimodal Neural Decoding of Intent During Social Interaction in Freely-behaving Human Infants
11:14

A Novel Experimental and Analytical Approach to the Multimodal Neural Decoding of Intent During Social Interaction in Freely-behaving Human Infants

Published on: October 4, 2015

K von Klitzing1, H Simoni, D Bürgin

  • 1Kinder- und Jugendpsychiatrische Universitätsklinik und Poliklinik, Basel.

The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis
|April 27, 1999
PubMed

Insights

Parental fantasies about their child before birth predict relationship quality after birth. Early relational development involves complex family dynamics, with a tendency to revert to simpler patterns under stress.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Psychoanalytic Theory
  • Family Systems

Background:

  • Understanding early relational processes is crucial for child development.
  • The concepts of triadification and triangulation offer a framework for analyzing family dynamics.
  • Parental representations during pregnancy shape future parent-child interactions.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the relational processes in early childhood using triadification and triangulation.
  • To examine the link between parental prenatal fantasies and postnatal parent-child interactions.
  • To explore the developmental trajectory of relational patterns in the first year of life.

Main Methods:

  • A prospective longitudinal study of 41 parents and their first-born infants.
  • Systematic analysis of parents' subjective views during pregnancy regarding parenthood and their unborn child.
  • Observation and comparison of dyadic and triadic parent-child interactions post-birth.

Main Results:

  • Prenatal assessment of triangulation in parental fantasies strongly correlated with the quality of triadic interactions at 4 months.
  • Prenatal triangulation also correlated with the quality of dyadic interactions at 1 year, particularly in stressful situations.
  • Findings suggest a connection between early parental representations and later interactional patterns.

Conclusions:

  • Child relational development can be understood in triadic terms from the outset.
  • Emotional dysregulation can lead to a regression towards simpler 'two-plus-one' relationship patterns.
  • The study has implications for psychoanalytic theories of early development and intervention strategies.

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