My Youngest Co-Analyst: The Baby in the Consulting Room

Who doesn't love babies? Sweet, beautiful babies. As analysts we love to think about all things baby. We try to learn about our patients' infant development. We hypothesize about our patients' earliest object relationships. We listen to each patient's inner baby. We love reading about infant research, thinking and debating about its role in adult analysis, watching videos of mothers and babies interact. But that seems to be where our love affair with the baby ends. As in almost everything else in analytic theory, we tend to privilege fantasy over reality, even though we know it is the dialectic between the two that creates the poignancy of our work.

Over the years I have discovered it is the rare patient who is a new parent (male or female, analytic or psychotherapeutic) who doesn't bring in the baby at least once or twice for me to meet. During my early years as a candidate and as a young analyst I responded awkwardly to the introduction of such an important guest. I would feel as if I were transgressing an inviolate analytic rule. Though I would always enjoy meeting the baby, it felt like a guilty pleasure. Today, after two decades of having the privilege of meeting these young visitors, my ideas about babies in the consulting room have changed. I would like to present a brief vignette that permanently altered my understanding of the possibilities for my patient, for the baby, and for analysis when babies enter our consulting room.1