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Emphasizing how significant the study of Sandor Ferenczi's work has been for her own clinical practice, Vida presented thought-provoking aspects of Ferenczi's “wise baby” metaphor, as well as an expanded rendition of her own, based on clinical material. Vida noted Ferenczi's idea that precocious intelligence is born solely of suffering, originating in a traumatic split between thinking and feeling. She remarked on his caveat that while all traumatized children may undergo a splitting of intellect and feeling, they may not all have sufficient intellect to become “wise babies,” and questioned this view, stating her own caveat that even children with extraordinary, innate intelligence do not necessarily become “wise babies.”
Vida speculated that an extraordinary, innate intelligence is necessarily associated with a particular kind of vulnerability, and an experience of “penetration by suffering,” which would be significantly more severe than that of a more average child. Specifically, she believes that it is this extraordinary intelligence that allows for the greater perception of suffering. She described Ferenczi's notion of a “counterpressure” optimally provided by the child's environment, necessary for the development of a healthy narcissism. Vida hypothesized that the wise baby requires this experience of counterpressure more than the average child, specifically because of the combination of extraordinary intelligence and increased vulnerability to suffering. Without it, the wise baby “overstretches” his capacity for containing that suffering.
Most sensitively, Vida presented clinical material with a patient whom she came to recognize as a wise baby. She sensed that to use a traditional analytic approach with this patient would be replicating a seminal, traumatic childhood scene with his mother that had taken place in the kitchen, preceding what Ferenczi described as the traumatic rupture between feeling and thinking. Vida voted the tremendous dilemma her patient was