Editorial

In this issue of the Journal we are very pleased to be able to publish a littleknown and unpublished paper by Esther Bick. She died in July 1983, leaving very little published evidence of her work in psychoanalysis. In spite of this she has left behind a powerful influence on those she trained and worked with. The publication in the Journal of a further paper brings her ideas to many more people, albeit in a very much more indirect way.

She was a devoted supporter and also a personal friend of Melanie Klein. If Freud discovered the child in his adult patients, Klein had gone back to look at the child and discovered the infant there. Esther Bick continued in this direction by working directly with infants. To do this she developed the infant observation technique, which is now a familiar feature of many psychotherapeutic trainings in this country. She reported this in a paper in 1964. With the new technique, she began to discover, with her students, new aspects of the psychology of infancy. She conceptualised this as the infant's experience of his own skin. The skin is not just a very important organ for perception in the new-born, but through its sensations, the skin comes to acquire the experience of an organ actually holding him together (or at times failing to do so and letting him fall apart). This view of the early experiencing of the infant is clearly parallel with the ideas being developed at the time by Bion (containing) and Winnicott (holding). However Esther Bick always distinguished her views from both Bion and Winnicott since, I think, she felt that the experience of holding was initially a sense of being held together, in a purely bodily way. And the eventual psychological phenomenon of ‘holding’ derived from a precursor in the bodily sensations. Thus she was in the tradition of Freud's comment that the ego was firstly a body-ego, and she gained access back to very primitive states of undifferentiation between mind and body. These research results of the