Daniel Stern (psychologist)

(1) In The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Stern proposed that an infant develops in a series of overlapping and interdependent stages or layers, which are increasingly interpersonally sophisticated. He distinguished four main senses of self: 'the sense of an emergent self, which forms from birth to age two months, the sense of a core self, which forms between the ages of two and six months, the sense of a subjective self, which forms between seven and fifteen months, and a sense of a verbal self'.[9]

The emergent sense gathers together the earliest 'sense of physical cohesion (..."going on being", in Winnicott's term)'.[10]

In the 'next life period, age two to seven months, the infant gains enough experience...[to] create an organizing subjective perspective that can be called a sense of a core self'.[11] At this stage, while intensely involved in social interaction with the [m]other, essentially 'the other is a self-regulating other for the infant...one who regulates the infant.'[12]

Thereafter, at the next stage of the subjective self, 'for there to be an intersubjective exchange about affect...the mother must go beyond true imitations, which have been an enormous and important part of her social repertoire during the first six months or so', and develop 'a theme-and-variation format...purposeful misattunements'.[13]

Finally, during the second year of the infant's life language emerges', to provide for a verbal self — creating thereby 'a new domain of relatedness', but one which 'moves relatedness onto the impersonal, abstract level intrinsic to language and away from the personal, immediate level'.[14]

(2) In a later edition of The Interpersonal World — 'revisiting a book written fifteen years earlier' — Stern added two more layers to his hierarchy of the self: the 'core self-with-another' preceding the subjective self; and finally the 'narrative self, or selves',[15] developing out of the verbal self.

Highlighting the setting of the narrative self in what he called 'The World of Stories', Stern emphasized how the capacity for 'interpreting the world of human activities in terms of story plots...psychological explanations embedded in the structure of a narrative...unfolds according to a genetically determined timetable'[16] around the age of three or four. On the positive side, 'the child, narrating an autobiographical story...is creating his identity'; on the negative side, however, possibilities for distortion, and for the consolidation of a false self, also emerge at this time: 'if the lived past and the narrated past are very discrepant...story making can establish and perpetuate distortions of reality – distortions that contribute significantly to mental disturbance'.[17]

In The Motherhood Constellation, Stern describes the motherhood constellation, a mother's instinctual focus on and devotion to her infant, as being critical to the child's development. Psychoanalytic support could take the form of '"the good grandmother transference"...appropriate to the motherhood constellation'.[18]

In 1995; he introduced the term "proto-narrative envelope." "This 'envelope,'" Person et al. write, "contains experience organized with the structure of a narrative. But...a story without words or symbols, a plot visible only through the perceptual, affective, and motoric strategies to which it gives rise".[19] Stern stressed how early experiences of mother-child interaction 'have a beginning, a middle, and an end and a line of dramatic tension; they are tiny narratives ... 'proto-narrative envelopes'.'[20]
He described "ports of entry" in terms of intervention to affect change in the relationship of mother and infant. These are the mother's view of herself, the mother's view of the infant, the infant's view of her/himself, and the infant's view of the mother. All of these are to be considered when designing an intervention strategy for a dysfunctional dyadic relationship.