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This is an important book. The author, Dr Romana Negri, has worked for nearly 20 years as an Infant Neuropsychiatric Consultant in Bergamo. She studied infant observation under Esther Bick and Martha Harris, and has more recently undertaken infant observations of babies in utero by means of ultrasound scans. These observations were supervised by Donald Meltzer who has contributed a foreword to the present book; and she has supplemented them by infant observations of the babies after birth and by long-term follow-ups. Although these studies, like the work of Alessandra Piontelli, have revealed many fascinating consistencies of individual characteristics between the time before birth and after, these findings are not the main concern of this book, from which four principal areas of relevance emerge. Firstly, and most importantly, Romana Negri presents the reader with the emotional experience of the seriously pre-term new-born, in real and prolonged danger of death and subjected to painful and invasive life-saving procedures. It is the sort of experience that witnesses seek to defend themselves against by asserting that the baby's behaviour is simply a consequence of neurological immaturity, or by focusing on the necessary interventions and technology. Romana Negri undertook minutely detailed, regular observations of these babies. They became individual human beings for her, as they do for the reader. On another level, it could be shown that one hour a week of an observer's attention brought about definite improvements in the babies' vital signs, a finding that she presented at the conference on infant observation held at the Tavistock Clinic in 1993.
Secondly, Dr Negri made infant observation an essential component of the method she developed for working with parents and with medical and nursing staff. Her detailed exposition of this method takes up roughly a third of the book, and should prove extremely useful to workers in this country. Thirdly, she made a careful st