Dr. Daniel Stern, a psychiatrist who increased the understanding of
early human development by scrutinizing the most minute interactions between
mothers and babies, died on Nov. 12 in Geneva. He was 78. The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Dr. Nadia Bruschweiler Stern.
Dr. Stern was noted for his often poetic language in describing how
children respond to their world — how they feel, think and see. He wrote one of
his half-dozen books in the form of a diary by a baby. In another book, he told
how mothers differ psychologically from women who do not have children. He
coined the term “motherese” to describe a form of communication in which
mothers are able to read even the slightest of babies’ emotional signals.
Dr. Stern, who did much of his research at what is now Weill Cornell
Medical College and at the University of Geneva, drew inspiration from Jay S.
Rosenblatt’s work with kittens at the American Museum of Natural History in the
1950s. Dr. Rosenblatt discovered that when he removed kittens from their cage,
they made their way to a specific nipple of their mother’s even when they were
as young as one day old. That finding demonstrated that learning occurs naturally
at an exceptionally early age in a way staged experiments had not.
Dr. Stern videotaped babies from birth through their early years, and
then studied the tapes second by second to analyze interactions between mother
and child. He challenged the Freudian idea that babies go through defined
critical phases, like oral and anal. Rather, he said, their development is
continuous, with each phase layered on top of the previous one. The
interactions are punctuated by intervals, sometimes only a few seconds long, of
rest, solitude and reflection. As this process goes on, they develop a sense
that other people can and will share in their feelings, and in that way develop
a sense of self.
These interactions can underpin emotional episodes that occur years in
the future. Citing one example in a 1990 interview with The Boston Globe, Dr.
Stern told of a 13-month-old who grabbed for an electric plug. His alarmed
mother, who moments before had been silent and loving, suddenly turned angry
and sour. Two years later, the child heard a fairy tale about a wicked witch. “He’s
been prepared for that witch for years,” Dr. Stern said. “He’s already seen
someone he loves turn into something evil. It’s perfectly believable for him.
He maps right into it.”
Dr. Stern described such phenomena in 1985 in “The Interpersonal World
of the Infant,” which the noted psychologist Stanley Spiegel, in an interview i in The New York Times, called “the book of the decade in its
influence on psychoanalytic theory.” In recent years, Dr. Stern ventured beyond
childhood development to examine the psychology of how people thought about time. In one experiment, he interviewed people in
depth about a single brief moment at breakfast and found that it took them a
full hour to describe all that went through their minds in 30 seconds. This
resulted in the 2004 book “The Present Moment: In Psychotherapy and Everyday
Life,” which called for people to appreciate every moment of experience and
discussed the nature of memory.
In 2010, he published “Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience
in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development,” which used new
understandings of neuroscience to explain human empathy. Dr. Stern, who wrote
hundreds of scientific articles, also painted, wrote poetry and had friendships
with important artists. He gave Jerome Robbins, the choreographer, the title
for his “Dances at a Gathering.” His friend Robert Wilson, the avant-garde
director and playwright, said Dr. Stern’s slow-motion baby films helped inspire
his seven-hour “silent opera,” “Deafman Glance.” “So many things are going on,
and the baby is picking them up,” Mr. Wilson said.
Daniel Norman Stern was born in Manhattan on Aug. 16, 1934. He graduated
from Harvard and completed his medical degree at the Albert Einstein College of
Medicine. After conducting psychopharmacology research at the National
Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., he did his residency in psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He later trained
as a psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research at
Columbia. Dr. Stern is survived by his wife, a physician who collaborated on
much of his research; two sons, Michael and Adrien; three daughters, Maria,
Kaia and Alice Stern; a sister, Ronnie Chalif; and 12 grandchildren.
Dr. Stern pointed out how the evolution of the human body bolstered
mother-child interaction. He noted that the distance between the eyes of a baby
at the breast and the mother’s eyes is about 10 inches, exactly the distance
for the sharpest focus and clearest vision for a young infant. “Her smile
exerts its natural evocative powers in him and breathes a vitality into him,”
he wrote. “It makes him resonate with the animation she feels and shows. His
joy rises. Her smile pulls it out of him.”
Source: NY Times
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