**1. Introduction**

Psychoanalysis and infant mental health research offer a large amount of knowledge about human development, pathology and interventions, which can partially be grounded in the findings of neuropsychoanalysis [1, 2]. These findings connect to what Stierlin conceptualized as relational individuation, or co-individuation ("Bezogene Individuation": the principle that "the higher the level of individuation in a family member, family, or group is, the higher the level of personal relating becomes, and is required at the same time") [3], a concept that originally aimed at psychic identities of members of a family system. The concept generally supports the principle of socialization modes in Lloyd deMause's approach of psychogenetic personality development [4, 5]. The psychogenetic personality concept illuminates the modes of manifestation of transgenerational psychodynamics, and even takes into account physiologically based premature birth in humans [6]. The concept hints at the mutual interaction of individual and societal development [7], which will show in subjectivity and in socialization modes. Illuminating their organic

substructure might be one of the challenges of future behavioral neuroscience, an interdisciplinary exchange of concepts and of mutual impregnation, the aim of future scientific cooperation. The question of how to bring together brain, mind, and the social will be one of the difficult tasks.

In the course of recent infant mental health research, fetal brain development has been examined from a bio-psychosocial perspective [8], as has been by Roth [9] from a neuroscientific one. In his depiction of prenatal and early postnatal processes of brain development, three levels in the limbic system correlate with temperament, with early experiencing, and with subsequent socialization, of which the latter may be responsive to compensatory intervention. Psyche, in the neuroscientific perspective, is strictly related to brain physiology, a controversial [10] still worthwhile approach, since it has been shown that early experiences will influence brain function and structure in humans [11]. What has mostly been accepted is that the concept of subject autonomy is generally challenged owing to Freud's observation, "Der Reflexvorgang bleibt das Vorbild auch aller psychischen Leistung (The reflex act remains the type of every psychic activity as well)," [12] which he stated to put psychic mechanisms in connection with automatic reflex processing, in order to emphasize the predominance of unconscious psychic processes. Around 100 years later, the findings about intuitive responses being in middle position between innate reflex behavior and seemingly more "rational" behavior, have been brought up thanks to video microanalyses of dyadic interaction of infants and parents. In this context, parental competencies are referred to as intuitive competencies [13–15]. These are elicited within a time frame of 200–600 ms. Not only mothers, also fathers, children, and other relational objects have been observed to show these; they are universal and to be found in persons of any age, any gender, and in any culture [16].

Spitz, in the 1960s, observed that the physical presence of the mother, i.e., of one relational object, is the basic precondition for successful infant mental development [17, 18]. Severe social deprivation in hospitalized and institutionalized children, which grew up without responses to their needs showed compromised development in many aspects [19, 20]. By now, diagnostic approaches and options of treatment of infants and toddlers even encompass a psychodynamic concept [21], focusing on conflict, structure, and relation perspectives, thus paving the way for developing a rather focus-oriented treatment approach. This will probably be used more frequently in the future, just like operationalized psychodynamics in OPD-2 has increasingly been used in studies of the last years [22]. Although operationalized psychodynamics has widely improved the clinical view of human development, misconceptions have not been avoided: specific cultural and social influences on the infant's development are still grossly neglected. Socioeconomic factors on mothers' sensitivity and on family functioning have only begun to be examined [23].
