“I sense that you sense that I sense…”: Sander's recognition process and the specificity of relational moves in the psychotherapeutic setting
✍ Scribed by Karlen Lyons-Ruth
- Book ID
- 101244570
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 72 KB
- Volume
- 21
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0163-9641
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
For more than 30 years, Sander has been one of our foremost theorists of dyadic systems. Sander is also one of the few theorists who have appreciated the problem of accounting for the emergence of a coordinated two-person system. In this pioneering role, he has struggled to create a language and to forge a set of principles and constructs when few other thinkers were grappling with similar issues. The intercoordination of human life at many levels of social organization, such as the family or the culture, is most commonly taken as a given. However, from his perspective both as a psychoanalyst and as an infant observer, Sander found himself engaged in the task of trying to describe the microprocess through which two unacquainted individuals come to know one another's minds in the service of conducting complex coordinated activity.
Sander's initial thinking about the critical role of what he calls recognition processes in human relationships grew out of his participation as a research psychiatrist in Eleanor Pavenstedt's longitudinal parent -infant study, in which he observed a wide variety of mother -infant dyads. These observations left him keenly sensitive to the infant's spontaneity and initiative in constructing his or her own direction of activity, as well as to the infant's vulnerability to sacrificing that spontaneity when pressured to engage in a performance desired by the other. This focused his attention on the nature of the negotiations within the mother -infant system. He viewed these negotiations as bringing about workable solutions to the mutual modifications that are necessary for achieving the gradual, but increasingly complex, process of adaptation between the new infant and his or her mother.
Sander came to view this adaptive process of fitting together as epigenetic in early development. That is, without stability at one level of task complexity, new and emergent properties of the system that are essential to the accomplishment of tasks at a next level of complexity may fail to appear. Sander's observations of negotiations within the dynamic tensions of the mother -infant system over the first 3 years of life made clear the wide spectrum of possible outcomes that are emergent properties of such a dyadic system (e.g., Sander, 1965). From these data he proposed an epigenetic sequence of five essential dyadic tasks of adaptation to be