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Alessandra Cavalli has presented us with a characteristically moving account of her work with a profoundly damaged child, Casper, in which it is evident that she uses the whole of her person (Jung 1954[1946], para. 367) unsparingly, even to the point of despair: at one point she says, ‘I fear I will die if I go on, a martyr to psychotherapy’. I say characteristically, because in her recent presentation to the Analytic Group of the Society of Analytical Psychology in London (Cavalli 2007a), she similarly demonstrates her unstinting and uncompromising self-immersion with her patients in the vas hermeticum or mercurial fountain (Jung 1954[1946], para. 402). The touching coda to Cavalli's paper which describes Casper as a now responsible ‘Key Boy’ at his school who has an affectionate relationship with his parents and is an excellent cook is testimony to the efficacy of her analytic endeavour.
Alessandra Cavalli has told us that she wants us as readers to reflect upon the theoretical implications of the material she has presented in this extraordinary clinical paper. I am honoured to have been asked specifically to write a response, for which I fear, as an adult analyst, I am poorly equipped.
My gratitude is, to a large part, due to the fact that writing this response has forced me to articulate a model of development which I was unaware of having. This, as I hope will become apparent, is one in which an infant emerges into the world at birth with a dazzling array of faculties in an emotional and discriminative structure which we might call a non-self reflexive self. This can only develop into a self capable of reflection, in which emotion feeds discrimination, with the help of parental mirroring. I realize that I derive the map of the discriminative faculties, many of which are present at birth, from Daniel Stern (1985); and an understanding of the mechanism of how this structure comes into time, space and self reflection through mirroring from Fonagy et al.(