Infant rhythms versus parental time: Promoting parent–infant synchrony Antoine Guedeney a,b,⇑ , Nicole Guedeney c , Susana Tereno c , Romain Dugravier a , Tim Greacen d , Bertrand Welniarz e , Thomas Saias d , Florence Tubach f , the CAPEDP Study Group 1 a Hospital Bichat Claude Bernard, APHP, University Paris 7, Paris, France b Unité de Recherche, INSERM U669 PSYGIAM, Paris, France c Hospital Institute Mutualiste Monsouris, Paris, France d Hospital Maison Blanche, Paris, France e Hospital EPS Ville-Evrard, France f VRC Hospital Bichat Claude Bernard APHP, France article info Keywords: Parent–infant synchrony Attachment disorganization Parenting Infant social withdrawal behavior Early prevention and intervention abstract Traditional psychoanalytic theories of early development have been put into question by developmental psychology, and particularly by attachment theory. Psychopathology appears to be more linked to inter- personal relationship problems rather than to intra-psychic conflict, as hypothesized in Freudian drive theory. Establishing synchrony between parent and infant is probably one of the major tasks of the first year of life. Attachment theory appears to be an effective paradigm to understand how caregiver responses to stressful infant situations give way to different regulatory strategies, which impact on the effectiveness of the stress buffer systems and its physiological impact on emotion and stress regulation. This paper underlines the importance of synchronization between infant and caregiver; it highlights the key concept of attachment disorganization and of its relationship with sustained social withdrawal as a defence mechanism and an alarm signal when synchronization fails, and underlines the importance of early interventions promoting parent–infant synchrony. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ‘‘Babies can’t wait’’. Selma Fraiberg, Clinical studies in infant mental health, 1980. ‘‘Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts’’. Phillip Roth, The Human Stain, 2002. 1. Babies and time Infants are highly sensitive to violations of rhythms and to con- tingency within the infant–caregiver interaction (Cohn and Tro- nick, 1987). To quote the Greek philosopher Chrisippe, ‘Only the present exists’ and this seems to be particularly true for the infant. When infants are faced with repetitive violations of interaction synchronization (Weinberg and Tronick, 1994), they find them- selves excluded from the present. Early in life, infants do not have sufficient acquired memory content to retrieve representations of a good caregiver. They have no other solution than to withdraw from the present. Sustained relational withdrawal behavior marks a sus- pension in time, far from a truly depressive position in the Kleinian sense of the term (Guedeney, 2007a,b). Relational withdrawal behavior is the infant’s way of handling repetitive or durable viola- tions of the expected synchrony within parent–infant relationships (Puura et al., 2010). 2. Synchrony in the first year of life 2.1. Role of parent–infant synchrony on social and emotional development Social and emotional development in early infancy is today rec- ognized as crucial for all aspects of functioning throughout the life- span (Brazelton et al., 1974; Sroufe, 1995). The infant’s ability to relate to and understand the social world develops through close and continuous interactions with his/her parents. Different factors can have a deleterious effect on early infant social and emotional development: premature birth or illness in utero, genetic risk 0928-4257/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jphysparis.2011.07.005 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: CMP Binet, 64 rue René Binet, 75018 Paris, France. Tel.: +33 1 42 55 03 09; fax: +33 1 42 52 29 72. E-mail address: antoine.guedeney@bch.aphp.fr (A. Guedeney). 1 CAPEDP Study Group (Compétences parentales et Attachement dans la Petite Enfance: Diminution des risques liés aux troubles de santé mentale et Promotion de la résilience – Parenting Skills and Attachment in Infants: Reducing Mental Health Risks and Promoting Resilience). CAPEDP Scientific Committee: Elie Azria, Emmanuel Barranger, Jean-Louis Bénifla, Bruno Carbonne, Marc Dommergues, Romain Dugravier, Bruno Falissard, Tim Greacen, Antoine Guédeney, Nicole Guédeney, Alain Haddad, Dominique Luton,  Dominique Mahieu-Caputo (deceased), Laurent Mandelbrot, Jean- François Oury, Dominique Pathier, Diane Purper-Ouakil, Thomas Saïas, Susana Tereno, Richard Tremblay, Florence Tubach, Serge Uzan and Bertrand Welniarz. Journal of Physiology - Paris 105 (2011) 195–200 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Physiology - Paris journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jphysparis