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There can be few people in psychoanalysis who have had so profound an influence and yet who have published so little as Esther Bick. Her influence could indeed be said to be in inverse proportion to the volume of her writings. The present paper offers a brief sketch of Bick's life and achievements and situates a recently rediscovered early work within the corpus of her ideas.
Born in Przemyśl, in Poland, Esther Bick , despite a difficult early life both emotionally and materially, always strove resolutely to achieve her ambitions, a capacity that contributed to her gaining early in her career a PhD in Child Psychology under Charlotte Bühler in Vienna. Later in her career this same trait led to her being regarded as uncompromising by some colleagues, most notably by John Bowlby over the Tavistock Clinic's child psychotherapy training. Following the Anschluss she fled with her then husband from the Nazis to Switzerland and travelled from there to England. Arriving in 1938 she began her psychoanalytic training, being analysed by Michael Balint and supervised by James Strachey and Melanie Klein, before going on to have a second analysis post-qualification with Klein.
Bick is best known in Britain for her pioneering development of child psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic (Bick 1962), infant observation within psychoanalytic education (Bick 1964) and for her ideas on the ‘psychic’ or, perhaps more accurately, proto-mental functions of the skin. The latter began with the idea that the experience of the skin forms one of the most primitive experiences of being passively held together, without which there would be a deadly falling to pieces. Here the experienced skin is an amalgam of the infant's own skin and that of mother obtained through handling. The internalization of this function, according to Bick, provides the infant with a