Sent Before My Time: A Child Psychotherapist's View of Life on a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit By Margaret Cohen, London:  Karnac, 2003.  224 pp.

Margaret Cohen describes in detail the struggle of premature babies to find some sense of containment. Informed by her training at the Tavistock Clinic with Martha Harris and her supervision with Donald Meltzer, she illustrates how containment is a prerequisite for a capacity for exploration. Cohen uses the word “voyage” (p. 181) to convey the sense of a developmental journey — a journey of making connections with one's own body and with the environment (in the absence of the mother's body), a voyage of weathering storms of fragmentation and impingement, of preconceptions and their realizations — all moving towards a sense of self. Every ordinary devoted mother understands this developmental voyage of early infancy, as the poet Cynthia Zarin (2002) writes in “Michael's Boat”:

When at night you woke

I sang to you, light in my arms

and your cheek wet, and the shore we

rowed toward was sleep.

… singing

the only song that

settled you, as if you knew

even then the journey we were on,

and you would be forever heading into