Case Response I: Tim Pilgrim

I finish reading the case vignette which has evoked many reveries but has also induced some inner unravelling. I can't dispel the alarming image of the unswaddled child. Then, resistance from somewhere inside, I can't comment on this case, I can't do this right now!’ I dash off an email to the Editor: ‘Sorry, but I'm likely going to bail on you. I can't do this case commentary. I've got too much going on; I'm bursting at the seams’. And then more. In some inchoate corner, the consternation worsens, then mixes with the confusion and dread of a known unknown. I recollect a recent clinical drawing where, off to the side, there is this inconsequential wad, an indiscernible bundle, abandoned under the bed. A dead-empty feeling hollows my gut and fear bands my heart, ‘The baby! We forgot the baby!’

The primitive emotion that erupts from the catastrophic realization of the dereliction of a child takes us all individually and collectively into the darkness. The abandoned child is abruptly sensationalized both within and without: inside we feel panic, terror, anguish, while outside is formed the stuff of harrowing headlines: a bundle in a dumpster, a blanketed package on a hospital doorstep, or the too-still backseat baby carrier in the stifling mall parking lot. ‘How could they?!’ More images of vulnerable children: a newborn in a basket sent floating down a river, a cribless baby placed in a feeding trough, a dead matchgirl curled in a back-alley.

Troubled thanks to the analyst for this vignette, its raw details and candid admissions, and the frightening invitation that leads us into such territory. When the neglected child is exposed in the consulting room, we are forced

into raw interpersonal spaces and obliged to find ways to contain our fear and distress, else we amplify the panic and constellate the terrorized caregiver who has lost her charge. What's more, once this isolated baby is retrieved - sobbing with fear, or worse, empty-eyed in cold silence - we must discov