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Updated: May 21, 2026

A Novel Experimental and Analytical Approach to the Multimodal Neural Decoding of Intent During Social Interaction in Freely-behaving Human Infants
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Introduction: babies in the consulting room: what happens when analyst, mother, and infant meet?

Jennifer Stuart1

  • 1The Institute for Psychoanalytic Education affiliated with NYU Medical School, New York, NY, USA. jstuartphd@gmail.com

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
|June 29, 2012
PubMed

Analytic work with a pregnant woman may foster the psychological gestation of the self-as-mother. For the mother--as for the infant--the developmental process continues well beyond delivery. It should not surprise us, then, that many mothers continue to bring their babies to sessions after birth. Analytic work in this context can affect a patient's sense of herself, and perhaps her competence, as a mother. Yet the presence of babies in the consulting room is an underacknowledged feature of contemporary practice. For this section of JAPA, we have collected three papers that explore some of the unique challenges and opportunities that arise when a patient brings her baby to treatment. Earlier versions of each paper were first presented at a panel, "Babies in the Consulting Room," at the June 2011 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in San Francisco.

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