Beatrice Beebe

Please Note: To preserve and respect both intellectual property rights and confidentiality, the seminar will not be recorded, nor is recording permitted.

How can we see what we don’t see: Infant research and adult treatment

Seminar description:

Face-to-face communication is essential to intimacy across the life-span. In infancy, face-to-face communication predicts social and cognitive development. The same principles of self- and interactive regulation documented in mother-infant research have been documented in adult treatment sessions. Adult-adult and parent-infant face-to-face communication is rapidly moving, multi-modal and too fast to fully capture with the naked eye. Because it is so rapid, much of our nonverbal communication is largely out of awareness – but it has tremendous communicative power. Video microanalysis slows this communication process down and allows us to see what we do not see in real time: a world of subtle, split-second, complex relating that we cannot otherwise grasp. We analyze self- and interactive regulation (contingency) and evaluate how each person responds to the partner. Infants can anticipate sequences of behaviors, and they come to expect patterns of interaction. These expectancies can bias the course of development, predicting, for example secure vs. insecure attachment outcomes, or more (vs. less) adaptive cognitive development.

The lecture will be in two parts: 
I. How can we see what we don’t see: Infant research, illustrated by (a) a gaze avoidant infant, (b) illustration of the origins of infant secure attachment, (c) illustration of the origins infant disorganized attachment
II. How can we see what we don’t see: Adult treatment, illustrated by (a) video feedback treatment: A patient who does not look (Sandberg & Beebe, 2020); (b) microanalysis of the first 30 seconds of the adult treatment session on zoom. 

About the Speaker:

Beatrice Beebe is an internationally recognized developmental and clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is an infant researcher known for video microanalysis of mother-infant interaction and its implications for infant and adult treatment. Her frame-by-frame video microanalyses provide a “social microscope” that reveal subtle details of interactions too rapid to grasp in real time with the naked eye. Her microscope has illuminated a dyadic systems view of communication; the origins of attachment; and the effects of risk conditions on mother-infant communication, such as maternal self-criticism, depression and anxiety, infant prematurity, and being pregnant and widowed on September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center bombing. More than 100 students have been trained in her research laboratory at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University Medical Center over the last three decades.    

Saturday 28th February 2026
9am to 11.30am AEDT (Sydney)
2.5-hour workshop

Download the PDF Flyer - Click here