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[The] papers provoked wide-ranging discussion. Immediately after the presentations… some discussion centred around Edna O'Shaugnessy's clinical material and its technical implications, and to her giving attention to integration/disintegration at the onset of the depressive position.
What the mother is as a psychological object for the newborn also prompted significant interest, including the degree that mothers might be more or less active in providing continuity for the baby. It was noted that there might be significant cultural differences in this regard, for example, in the relative importance of eye-to-eye contact.
This raised the question of what it is that is being ‘integrated’. Bick's original paper referred to the function of attention in pulling or holding together the ‘parts of the personality’ (emphasis added) previously felt to be held together passively in utero, and to how eventually an identification with the function of the holding object would give rise to the idea of internal and external spaces. Following Bion's account of functions of attention, the integration of different sense modalities is implicitly required in the notion of mental space and in what Bion calls ‘common sense’. The relevance of claims of developmental researchers like Colwyn Trevarthen were explored, in particular the idea that in good circumstances infants are born in a relatively highly integrated state with respect to sensory–perceptual systems, manifested in coordinations between vision, hearing, reaching and so on. Interestingly these coordinations do not persist in a uniform manner, as a certain amount of de-coupling or de-integration is required to allow for growth and divergent development in different developmental systems.
We were dispersed into eight small groups for further discussion, to report back to the main hall to feedback and/or to continue the discussion and for a plenary. There were interesting differences in how the groups responded to this task, as if we f