You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dear Sir,
I found this an extremely interesting paper, which raises some highly thought-provoking and controversial questions and is well worthy of a thorough discussion.
Research is about crossing boundaries—into new areas of knowledge or new theories that supersede prevailing ones. Dr Norman wishes to demonstrate that he has crossed boundaries by announcing a kind of psychoanalytical transcendentalism; he wants to show that by adopting psychoanalytic technique and theory in work with infants it is possible to transcend the limits of an infant's language acquisition. I would like to express some serious doubts about this.
His hypothesis is:
that the interaction between the infant and the analyst may be able to activate and retrieve those parts of the infant's inner world that have been excluded from containment and be conducive to a vitalisation of the emotional disturbance that can then become worked through in the mother–infant relationship (2001, p. 83).
This means that, first and foremost, the interaction with the infant leads to changes in the infant's inner world and second that this has beneficial repercussions on the infant–mother relationship. In his paper and the reported setting and clinical vignettes, he tells us that the infants' mothers are present during the sessions, although they are not at all the focus of his attention or interest. But taking the mother's presence into account must bring still another hypothesis into the discussion. This one is about the importance Norman's attitude and talking to the infant has on her mind, quite independently of what it means to the infant. Because it must also be reckoned that she is influenced in a way that can alter the relationship for the better for them. Norman makes it clear that in the case of one of the infants, named Maria, this has been very important (p. 94). He also discusses and acknowledges the importance his activities have for the mothers, but only as a sequel to what he supposes is happening in the