From Cradle to Couch: Essays in Honor of the Psychoanalytic Developmental Psychology of Sylvia Brody is a compilation of select papers written by distinguished authorities in the field that are specifically dedicated to the important and extensive body of work of Dr. Sylvia Brody with regard to the fields of infant, child, adolescent, developmental psychology and psychoanalysis. So extensive and far-reaching have her longitudinal investigations been that more and more research studies are now being done with infants, children and adolescents. Moreover, as a result of her dedication over many decades, there is a greater awareness and emphasis worldwide of the critical importance of understanding normal child developmental processes and of recognizing the circumstances that interfere with a child’s emotional and physical growth, as well as appreciating and fostering the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and social/cultural conditions necessary for children to thrive. But that is not where her contributions end. Dr. Brody has also supplied us with psychoanalytic and psychodynamic methods by which children whose early development was less than optimal, and where normal development was detoured or otherwise impeded, can be helped. In the following pages, the editors have gathered together an anthology of fine papers which examine children from this country and abroad; manuscripts that in one way or another—either explicitly or implicitly--have been influenced by the trailblazing work of Dr. Sylvia Brody and the tradition she set for carrying out research and using her findings as her primary basis for many of the innovative therapeutic practices she helped to establish. For the reader who is somehow unfamiliar with Dr. Brody’s work, a cursory review of a mere smattering of her publications ought to be sufficient to provide at least a sense of her pioneering labors, and ultimately, what turns out to be, her prescience. 3
