Rock-A-Bye Baby

In the folk nursery rhyme “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” also known as “Hush-a-Bye Baby” (Engelbreit, 2005), the melodic nature of the song can put a baby to sleep. Yet the words also give the parent permission to sometimes harbor some thoughts that are not necessarily very endearing: “Rock-a-Bye baby on the tree top, When the wind blows the cradle will rock, When the bough breaks the cradle will fall, And down will come baby, Cradle and all. Down will come baby, Cradle and all.” Winnicott (1949, p. 73), in “Hate in the counter-transference,” informs the reader that “Rock-a-Bye Baby is not a sentimental rhyme.”

In Lydia Davis’s short story “The old dictionary,” the narrator tells us, “Even though my son should be more important to me than my old dictionary I can’t say that each time I deal with my son, my primary concern is not to harm him” (Davis 2010, p. 374). In the Paris Review (Aguilar & Fronth-Nygren, 2015), Davis tells us that the kernel of her story started with her perception of the idea that the old dictionary was treated better than her son. This writer uses a stream of consciousness in her style, and she is acutely aware of her mind and the mind of the other. This writer holds the mind of her son in her mind. Susan Coates, at the November 13–15, 2015 conference in Paris, France, on “Infant–Parent Disturbance: Theory and Therapy,” chaired by Harold P. Blum and Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor, attended to this basic tenet of mentalization.

This issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis comprises the papers presented during that weekend, when Paris was under terrorist siege with 130 people killed and 415 people injured. One could not help but wonder what goes on in the mind of the terrorist to commit such atrocities against mankind. Does the internal object destroyed in unconscious fantasy in early life become revitalized and externalized into the world with a destructive aggressive force where there is no boundary in regard to civility? The participants at this confer