Turning the Roles Upside Down: Can a Baby Dream the Mother's Infantile Trauma?

Bion postulated that the unconscious develops from the capacity to dream. Expanding his interest in the psychotic functioning of the mind, he wrote that alongside conscious and unconscious states of mind, there is a third psychic category: the inaccessible unconscious. He relates this mental category to the most archaic memory traces, including those related to earliest traumas registered only in non-representational form. During a mother-child therapy, with a profoundly traumatized mother, the author observes how the mother's lack of psychic containment increased the expression of the child's emotions through disharmonious and untargeted body movements. The author offers channels for nonverbal communication based on identifying the distortion in this very primitive formal layer of experience. Thinking of the baby's movements and presymbolic expressions as nascent “dreams,” the author uses them in session to share something of the mother's “ontological anxiety” with her, communicating them as a “selected fact,” potentially useful in catching something of the mother's inaccessible unconscious and unavailability.