The origins of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder a

66 JOHN S. AUERBACH
In addition, mutual gazing between mother and infant, an ability
that emerges by the second month of life, is central to the communicative
process. In this process, it is the mother who tends to gaze
steadily, while the infant controls the dialogue by making and breaking
visual contact, by looking at mother and looking away (Stern, 1977).
In this early stage of development, communication occurs through cycles
of matching, disruption, and repair (Beebe & Lachmann, 1988;
Gianino & Tronick, 1988; Lachmann & Beebe, 1989; Tronick, 1989).
Thus, Beebe and Gerstman (1980; see also Beebe & Stern, 1977) have
constructed a scale of mother-infant affective facial engagement. At
the top of the scale is the gape smile (scale point 90); at the bottom is
an inhibition of responsivity, with a limp, motionless drooping of the
head and an aversion of gaze (scale point 10). In general, mothers and
infants match on the direction of change, positive or negative, but avoid
an exact match on the level of the scale; the overall process is controlled
by mutual regulation (Beebe & Lachmann, 1988; see also Cohn &
Tronick, 1988).
Tronick (1989; Gianino & Tronick, 1988) reports that cycles of matching,
disruption, and repair, in which mother and infant move from
matched affective states to unmatched states and back again, can and
usually occur within a span of less than 1 second. Lachmann and Beebe
(1989) propose that these cycles of match, mismatch, and repair constitute
a presymbolic source of experiences of oneness, experiences that
may provide affective content to (healthy) narcissistic fantasies, and of
a sense of self. Specifically, matches and repairs may be related to the
sense of oneness in later life, and mismatches, if not too intense, may
be related to a sense of a separate self. On the other hand, intense
mismatches, as in the still-face experiment (Tronick, Als, Adamson,
Wise, & Brazelton, 1978), in which a mother attempts to maintain a
deliberately still face instead of a normal interactive facial display, or
pervasive mismatches, in the form of the chase-and-dodge interaction
reported by Beebe and Stern (1977), are significant disruptions of mutual
regulation. In the short term, as in the still-face experiment, they
result in infant distress, and a sequence of mismatches, as in chaseand-dodge
interaction, results in infant disengagement through gaze
aversion. In the longer term, it is hypothesized, the infant begins to
internalize not a sense of a separate self but instead a representation
of derailment (Spitz, 1964) or of interactive misregulation.