Who are you? Who am I to you? A mother and infant’s experience of difference

This paper is about an infant’s first experience of ‘relating to the other’ as explored through once weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a mother and her infant over a period of 18 months. It considers the impact of trauma on the mother’s capacity to develop reverie for her infant in any ordinary way. It explores the significance of the third in being able to bear the splitting of hateful projections of the infant in order to protect a good maternal object, and, ultimately, in being able to allow space for the mother–infant relationship to come into being and develop. The impact of patriarchal and fundamentalist states of mind on mothering, where utter certainty is a feature, and the roots of such states in infancy are also considered. This paper aims to highlight the urgency of psychotherapeutic early intervention for parents and their infants where there is severe relational trauma in a parent that compromises the infant’s mental health and development from the beginning. Child psychotherapists, with further specialist supervision and training, are well placed to do such work due to their experience of psychoanalytic infant observation and capacity to tolerate and think about disturbing states of mind and early infantile anxieties.