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Catherine Mallouh’s paper, and the work described in it, is moving and beautiful. She describes her work with two very desperate women who felt unable to mother their new babies. They both lacked a sense of a mother inside them who could mother them and therefore allow them successfully to achieve and use what she points out Winnicott termed primary maternal preoccupation and Bion called a state of reverie (Bion, 1962; Winnicott, 1975). Catherine goes on to explore further ideas about what it is psychologically and emotionally to become a mother. She rightly gives the most space to Winnicott with his emphasis on the way the mother feels her way into the baby’s state via empathy, gives herself over to her infant, and becomes keenly oriented to his being and his needs.
She also explains that Bion’s concept of reverie signifies that the mother is capable of a very special receptivity to the infants states - taking them in, but not being too overwhelmed by them, able to provide alpha function (lend meaning to the experience) which is able to transform it into something bearable and digestible. She adds that Bion mentions a mother who may be 'incapable of reverie’ but does not explore this further. Yet we can ask, as does Catherine, where primary maternal preoccupation and reverie are lacking, what we can do to repair this damage or deficit? Catherine Mallouh offers some answers:
She points out that the treatment of these women requires an immediate and intensive engagement, in fact providing the kind of care the mother is unable to provide for her baby. But before illustrating this, she takes a closer look at what it is that enables a mother to mother well, and here she invokes Benedek and Raphael-Leff who stress that the mother needs to both identify with and separate from her own mother (Benedek, 1959; Raphael-Leff, 2000). However if the grandmother was inadequate this is not the whole story. It is recognition of her own baby self in her baby and how her infant self exp