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For twenty years Mara Sidoli taught and wrote about infants and mothers from a Jungian perspective. With Michael Fordham she elaborated a body of work that added considerable substance and sophistication to an area in analytical psychology which had been somewhat overlooked. Jung engaged in theorizing about and working with children early in his career but then put it aside for the sake of his larger project of lifespan theorizing. Erich Neumann and Michael Fordham took up the subject of infancy and childhood in the 40s and 50s, and their respective followers have planted a varietal garden of experience and learning in this area. To this effort Sidoli has made several solid and important contributions, this latest collection of essays being one of them. It is not an exaggeration to speak of Sidoli as a pioneer in the field of infant observation and a leading figure in this area of research among Jungian analysts.
In this collection of her late essays, Sidoli probes into the psychosomatic base of behavioural disturbances, linking the symptoms to early deficits in the infant-mother dyad and to the consequent disarray in archetypal structures of the young mind-body unit. In this endeavour, she attempts to show the value of the theory of archetypes in understanding such basic life events as birth and early patterns of development as well as pathologies, such as autism. The book is richly detailed with clinical case material.
The work contains eight chapters, each tightly focused on a specific clinical or theoretical theme. Some are more general and theoretical, such as the first (‘Archetypes and birth’), the third (‘The Jungian infant’), and the seventh (‘The psychosoma and the archetypal field’). The more clinical chapters, for instance, ‘The little puppet: working with autistic defences in mother-infant psychotherapy’ and ‘Defence of the self in a case of severe deprivation’, show Sidoli at work. Her clinical writing is vivid and lively, and often it also reveals her se