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This is a very readable book, the result of a collaboration between a psychoanalyst and a paediatrician. The first section is a vivid description of the changes that take place in the minds of parents-to-be in anticipation of their baby's birth. The second and third sections are accounts of the newborn's capacity for human contact and the early interactions between the baby and the parents, taken largely from Brazelton's research. The fourth section describes the impact of the parents' past experiences and phantasies on this interaction. The fifth section links these different perspectives into a clinical approach to the sort of problems which arise between parents and their babies.
The account of the psychological processes at work within the parents during a pregnancy has a vivid ‘life as it is lived’ quality. The upheavals and difficulties which beset the parents are seen as the unfolding of rich natural processes, towards which clinical judgements are largely inappropriate. What is required is a perspective of humanity and awe at forces which look so disorganizing of the personality and yet result in a state of readiness for a new life. These timeless internal developments are set within the current external pressures of a Western society.
Into this world and with his own history of intra-uterine experiences arrives the