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Catherine Mallouh’s paper (2022) and the commentaries by Alvarez (2022), Thomson-Salo (2022) and Watanabe (2022) show us the special fluidity, porosity and self-righting tendencies of the infant-parent system in early human development. The baby can be sensitive to inklings of change in the mother, and then responds congenially, so as to recognize and amplify them. This in turn supports the mother’s change process, mobilizing capacities for progressive development in her that were previously inaccessible. When the baby responds positively - even enthusiastically - to such movement, his own development is enhanced. A virtuous cycle can ensue, as we see in Mallouh’s case. Often, this extends to the rest of the immediate family - other caregivers and parents, siblings, extended family members and wider circles in the neighborhood and the worlds of work and recreation. In the “ideal case,” the damaging potentials of the repetition of the agonizing past are supplanted by the natural potentials for progressive development, to the extent possible.
Attention and conceptualization toward the infant-parent dyad is at the base of this approach, but we often see how the interrelated spheres of individual psychology and the larger sociocultural and economic surrounds are in dynamic, potentially progressive transaction, much like the action within the dyad itself. The therapeutic relationship itself is also in a fluid relationship with both the internal and external worlds of the baby, the mother and the dyad.
The case further illustrates how these processes are a matter of internal representations, memories, fantasies, identifications and projections - Fraiberg, Adelson, and Shapiro’s (1975) “ghosts in the nursery.” In pregnancy and the postpartum, caregivers’ internal representations are especially available and in dynamic flux. There are few life transitions as dramatic and rapid as the move to becoming a parent. The caregiver, the family and the relationship to the larger cultu