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Margaret Cohen's book is essentially about people's stories: the heartfelt telling and listening of lives shared in a community of nurses, doctors, mothers and fathers and their tiny, vulnerable and sometimes very sick babies. ‘In some sense I feel that my whole life is poured into this book’ she says in her Introduction to the telling of her stories from the 12 years she worked in Neonatal Intensive Care. Beginning with some personal recollections, her memories of a childhood, wartime in Kent, a kitchen garden and her father's ‘huge and competent hands’, the reader is drawn into the very heart of the matter, that the work of the child psychotherapist in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) resonates with the intimate and private beginnings and endings in our own lives and how deeply personal and subjective experiences weave themselves into the ways in which we work in this medical domain. In this beautifully written book, Cohen's hugely competent heart and mind has given child psychotherapists, and other professionals working in this field, a real gift.
What lies at the centre of NICU life are the babies and it is their experience which the child psychotherapist, using psychoanalytically informed infant observation, attempts to articulate and render meaningful. To this Cohen blends her knowledge of philosophical issues to consider the inexhaustible interpretations of the experience of these fragile and traumatised infants, and the states of mind evoked in their parents and carers, by their dramatic entry into the world.
Thus the door of the first chapter opens into the secluded, awesomely technical world of the NICU, riven on occasion by ways of working which do not always sit comfortably together, and this is elaborated in the chapter ‘Two ways of seeing’. An encounter with a frail baby of 24 weeks gestational age introduces the first narrative, which, as well as being one of several fine examples of infant observation in the book, also draws attention to the dilem