Introduction: Internal representations and parent-infant relationships

Infant mental health practitioners have continually striven to understand and to improve disordered parent-infant relationships. Recently, researchers have begun attempts to describe and study these relationships systematically. There is an increasing interest in the construction of internal representations as indices of how relationship patterns are carried internally and transmitted from parent to child. This special issue of the Infant Mental Health Journal presents theoretical and clinical perspectives on internal representations, as well as results from some preliminary empirical investigations. This new convergence of efforts among theoreticians, clinicians, and investigators may yield important advances in our efforts to capture the complexity and riches of parent-infant relationships and their disorders.