Antoine Guédeney is a pediatric psychiatrist, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Paris. For twenty years he has been director of the Polyclinique Ney Jenny Aubry, associated with the Hôpital Bichat in Paris, which was the first center for the study of separation and deprivation in children, and where Françoise Dolto and Myriam David have worked. Internationally recognized for his work on early psychopathology and attachment disorders, he is the recipient of the Grand Prix for research from the Institut de France, and the René Spitz Research Award from the WAIMH (World Association for Infant Mental Health), of which he was the second French president following Serge Lebovici.

A baby exhibits psychological development that is extraordinary in its range, its rapidity, and its resilience. In less than three years, thanks to his interactions with his environment, notably with his parents, when all goes well, he becomes a being of language, sociability, full of curiosity and inventiveness. The other side of the coin is a baby’s very great sensitivity (still too often under-estimated) to the “failures of a relationship.”

How can we identify the first signs that something isn’t right in a baby, sometimes only a few months old? How should relational withdrawal be considered an incontestable expression of suffering that cannot be expressed through words? How can it be identified, how can it be measured?

Long convinced that a baby cannot wait for the conditions of his environment to be good or better for someone to pay attention to him, Antoine Guédeney in this book returns to the trajectory of his life, the one that led him to focus on the distress of very young children, notably through the development of an original and innovative scale, the Alarm Distress Baby Scale (ADBB), currently used throughout the world.