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I will make two main points, firstly, to consider a baby’s contribution to the feminine within Western psychoanalytic notions, trying for a major alignment of psychoanalysis with clinical infant mental health, to bridge these perspectives with those from infant studies (and neuroscience), to link psychoanalysis with nearby sciences and to illustrate an intersubjective approach in brief perinatal infant–parent psychotherapy.
I will suggest how current knowledge of babies could affect the feminine, mindful of cultural variations in parenting and open to the criticism of being too simplistic. Leaving aside theoretical debates about connections between femininity and motherhood, I hope to show in two vignettes of brief applications of psychoanalytic theory and mainly short-term clinical interventions in a consultation-liaison service in a busy maternity hospital with 8000 births a year what can be achieved in psychoanalytically derived intervention in the perinatal period. The vignettes describe women with a background of trauma and substance use; I intervened with bonding issues primarily using containment, which can be widely accepted. I will discuss an infant contributing to the feminine, viewing motherhood as a developmental process, and then review the concepts of early Oedipus, and bisexuality, as, without denying the role of envy and aggression from an infant mental health perspective, these concepts may no longer hold centre stage as much as they once did.
Finally, I touch on possible implications for psychoanalytic intervention. It may seem that I am not talking about the feminine but bear with me until the clinical section.
Clinical infant mental health perspectives support psychoanalytic views about the desire to care empathically for a baby, to desire and be desired bidirectionally, along with greater freedom to choose not to be a mother. The many assisted reproductive techniques highlight the insistent desire in so many women for