The Subjective Experience of Infants II: Daniel Stern

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering Daniel Stern's theory of infant subjective experience, domains of self-experience, invariant structures, affective attunement, and narrative development.

Observed Infant

The conceptualization of the infant derived from modern infant observation that is normative, prospective, and objective.

Clinical Infant

The conceptualization of the infant constructed in psychoanalytic and clinical settings that is retrospective, subjective, pathomorphic, and adultomorphic.

Daniel Stern's Stance on Symbiosis

The developmental principle from Stern ($1985$) stating that infants never experience total self/other undifferentiation or a symbiotic-like phase; subjective experiences of union with another can occur only after a core self and core other exist.

Domains of Self-Experience

Levels of selfhood and interpersonal relating that emerge sequentially at particular developmental times but remain active throughout the individual's entire life.

Emergent Self and Relating

The first domain of self-experience, emerging from birth to $2\text{ months}$, defined as a sense of organization in the process of formation where the infant is pre-designed to be aware of self-organizing processes.

Amodal Perception

The infant's capacity to recognize objects and information independently of specific sensory channels as higher-order representations, demonstrated by cross-modal matching such as visual-tactile (seeing and sucking a pacifier) and visual-acoustic ($7\text{ flashes of light}$ matching $7\text{ beats of a drum}$).

Categorical Affects

Discrete, traditional emotional categories experienced and expressed by infants, such as happy, sad, and angry.

Vitality Affects

Dynamic, kinetic feelings captured by movement contours and qualitative descriptors such as surging, fading, explosive, or crescendo, rather than static emotional labels.

Core Self and Relating

The second domain of self-experience, emerging at $2 - 6/7\text{ months}$, wherein the infant develops agency, recognizes a separate physical existence from the mother, and experiences unique internal states of being through face-to-face interactions.

Self-Agency

The constituent element of the core self in which the infant experiences being the author of their own actions, grounded in neural motor plans that are formulated in advance and operate independently of the specific muscles used.

Self-Coherence

The constituent element of the core self characterized by experiencing oneself as a physical whole, comprising unity of locus, coherence of motion, coherence of time (self-synchrony), and coherence of form.

Self-Affectivity

The constituent element of the core self where feelings originate from within the self, mediated by fixed emotional patterns that provide invariant proprioceptive feedback, motor orders, arousal sensations, and qualities of feeling.

Self-History

The constituent element of the core self providing continuity of experience over time, reliant on memory for integrating invariants across repetitive interactions.

Representation of Interactions that have been Generalized (RIG)

A mental structure and higher-order abstraction formed when repetitive parent-child interactive episodes share a constant central theme despite variations, providing a sense of invariance and internal self-regulation.

Subjective Self and Intersubjective Relating

The third domain of self-experience, emerging at $7/9 - 15\text{ months}$, marked by the infant sensing an interior subjective life of their own and reading the minds of others to share attention, intentions, and emotions without language.

Affective Attunement

The caregiver's nonverbal resonance that matches and reflects the infant's internal feeling state through vitality affects, matching in intensity, temporal patterns, and form rather than exact behavioral imitation.

Communing Attunement

A form of true affective attunement that enables the genuine nonverbal sharing of an inner emotional experience between caregiver and infant.

Overattunement

A pattern of caregiver attunement where excessive mirroring leads the infant to develop an illusory feeling of sharing a single, dual mentality with the mother.

Purposeful Misattunement (Tuning)

An intentional modulation of attunement in which the caregiver subtly shifts the level of intensity or timing to alter and regulate the infant's arousal state.

Non-Purposeful Misattunement

An inadvertent failure or mismatch in caregiver attunement that undermines authentic sharing and can lead to the formation of a false self.

Verbal Self and Relating

The fourth domain of self-experience, emerging at $15/18\text{ months and beyond}$, characterized by an objective sense of self ("me"), language use, and the capacity for symbolic play.

Narrative Self and Relating

The fifth domain of self-experience, emerging at $30\text{ months and beyond}$, where the child learns to tell autobiographical stories and constructs a public narrative self by "trying on" different identities.

Narrative Truth

The coherence, plausibility, and explanatory power of the subjective story constructed about an event, contrasted in psychoanalysis with historical truth (what literally took place).

False Self (in Narrative Domain)

A psychopathological condition occurring within the narrative domain when an individual's public constructed narrative becomes split off from their authentic lived experience.