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My own introduction to psychoanalysis came in what I'm tempted to call the bad old days of mid-twentieth-century psychoanalysis. In college and as a psychology major in the late 1950s, I read Robert Lindner's Fifty Minute Hour. Along with others of my generation, I learned about the dangers of being witness to the primal scene. Even, it seems, from the crib such witnessing would be traumatic.
Even then there were doubts, of course, but by now our psychoanalytic views and our culture's views are much changed. Here, for example, is the poet Galway Kinnell on the marriage bed and the primal scene, in a poem I've always loved.
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud musicor sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishmanand Fergus will only sink deeperinto his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,but let there be that heavy breathingor a stifled come-cry anywhere in the houseand he will wrench himself awake