Discussion

Dr. Pally sees Joan's infantile nonverbal behavior as stemming from an early preverbal period, as representing an arrest in development, and as requiring comforting responses in order for Joan to develop trust, feel safe, and acquire the capacity to put her feelings into words. “Her anxieties struck me like infant cries of distress”; “I felt like a mother ministering to a distressed baby”; ‘This part [of Joan] was totally overwhelmed by anxiety and was not responsive to my words.”

There was also the adult Joan who wanted treatment, came to her sessions but was reluctant to commit herself, verbally expressing her fear of her neediness and anger, of rejection and punishment. She asked for, understood, and responded to both nonverbal and verbal reassurance. Being verbally reassured about the incident with the homeless man, that she was not responsible, need not feel guilty, and that anyone, even the analyst, can make a mistake, resolved her dilemma about analysis. “She made the developmental step of trusting me….”

I don't think that she took a step in early development that she had never taken. Instead, the analyst's reassurances and explanations reduced her anxiety sufficiently to make her feel safer.

I believe that Joan's infantile behavior was a complex compromise formation, not an arrest in development. It was a regression based on a fantasy, not on an actual memory of infancy. By responding as she did to Joan's nonverbal cues, the analyst “deciphered” aspects of this fantasy, not “an aspect of Joan's [actual] experience in infancy, when her depressed mother was unable to respond to her.”

Early experiences were no doubt important in the development of Joan's compromise formation, but it is impossible, even in a lengthy analysis, to reconstruct the infant's experiences in the preverbal period. On the basis of observational research and follow-up studies, I