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My first reading of this paper reminded me of a case presentation where a patient’s symptom was that he was often “inconsolable”, particularly toward evening and bedtime. The striking thing about the patient’s mother seemed to have been her lack of awareness of her child’s states of distress. One could view Michel Fain’s discussion of passivity and mentalization as raising the question “what is the psychoanalytic nature of being consoled?” I had wondered if the patient was not simply “inconsolable” by his nature but was repeating a scene of not being consoled or repeating a connection of non-consolation with someone. I will use the human experience of “consolation” to help us interact with Fain’s paper.
For an Anglophone reader, myself included, Fain’s paper is dense with metapsychological terms which the author uses to make connections between passivity and mentalization. Fain also tends to move from one subtopic to another in a manner that is not so easy to follow. There is a sense that this paper is part of long conversations and debates within French psychoanalysis whose context is difficult for the current reader to understand. My approach to the dense metapsychological terminology of Fain’s text will be to paraphrase or unpack parts of Fain’s text in order to elaborate the continuing relevance of the ideas in the paper.
The clearest entry point into clinically applicable ideas is on page four, where Fain discusses the role of the mother in the functioning of sleep as restorative for mind and body of the child. For sleep to occur, the child must mentally decathect or disinvest the sensory-motor system which links its mind to sensor input from external reality. According to Fain, to help the infant in this disinvestment of the external world, the mother needs to create a “tender cathexis” with the child in a comforting body to body contact that tends to shield the child from stimuli which would disrupt going to sleep. The paradox here is that the mother herself is