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This course was developed by Ethel Goldwater Clevans as the best introduction to the treatment of preverbal disorders. Clevans emphasized the relieving. She agreed with Winnicott and Spotnitz that at this stage of development there is only now; whatever remains from the past is experienced as having its total reality in the present. This is how Winnicott described psychotic transference: the feelings about the self and the caretakers are not remembered—the past is the present: not “you are like my mother,” but “you are my mother.”3
It is currently taught every other semester by Don Shapiro and one semester in alternate years by Dorothy Gloster and Faye Miller, all Center graduates. Shapiro is the author of Modern psychoanalytic research and A portrait of Ethel Clevans. Shapiro, in his discussion of this course, points out that psychoanalysis has only gradually extended its perspective to include infancy and prenatal growth, and that we should expect to find intense difficulty in communicating meaningfully within this realm.
Shapiro refers to this developmental period as one concerned with the fundamental issues of life and death. He poses nine questions designed to focus on some of the difficulties of this period of growth. Addressing the class, he asks:
Is this a group of people you would like to know?
Is everyone feeling passionate, loving involvement here?
Are we people you would like to raise a child with?
All quotes refer to an attached reading list for the course under discussion.
Have you some idea what the people who are not speaking may be experiencing?
What means of communicating here gives you the greatest sense of validity?
Are we prepared to become, to respond creatively now, at the risk of emerging different?