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How can analysts explain the frequent uncanny communications that occur between mother and baby and between analyst and patient? How can early mental and bodily experiences, organised pre-conceptually, be translated into the abstract language of adulthood and science? These two questions summarise the goals of this impressive volume.
Ivri Kumin has a formidable command of the literature relating to early childhood development, experimental and psychoanalytic, as well as to broad psychoanalytic theory. He provides ample references to his previous work and to the work of the significant contributors to the field. His impressive knowledge of the field is both an asset as well as a problem. On the one hand, a reader can use this volume as a reference to the field of early childhood development and its connection to the psychoanalytic endeavour. On the other, one can be somewhat overwhelmed by the many references and many quotations, which divert the reader from the author's main argument.
Kumin's aim is to highlight the similarities, the ‘common ground’ that Wallerstein stresses, of the approaches of a variety of authors, including, but not limited to, Melanie Klein, Bion, Winnicott, Spitz, Bowlby, Kernberg, Kohut, Stolorow, Greenacre, Stern and Ogden. All of these authors, as well as others, describe the infant's early ego experiences, which Kumin labels as pre-object relatedness—a state characterised by the pre-verbal exchange between mother and infant of emotions and regulatory functions that persists