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This paper was written in response to an invitation by J-B. Pontalis to contribute to a volume of the Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse devoted to ‘The Child’. The contributors were asked to talk about their responses when being with a child. The paper was published in Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 19 (1979). An altered English version of this paper was published in a book in honour of P.J.van der Leeuw’s seventieth birthday: Psychoanalytici aan het woord, Deventer: Van Loghum Slaterus BV, 1980. It is this English text that is published here.
I shall start with the first ideas that came into my mind immediately after reading J-B. Pontalis’s1 invitation to take part in a project that I warmly welcome. The word ‘ideas’ is not quite correct. What occurred to me were pictures, scenes, memories of contact with children outside my professional activities.
A young mother visited us with her four-months-old baby daughter. After welcoming her and her baby, we, the hosts, were the recipients of her attention. Not having seen us for some time, she had many things to tell us. I noticed that the baby in her arms felt excluded and tried repeatedly to make her mother turn to herself. She was positively wooing her mother, and persevered, for what seemed to me a very long time, without crying or expressing disappointment or anger in other ways. And thus her mother did not notice her. But, after a while, I could not bear it any longer, I did not wish the child to reach the limit of her tolerance. Knowing that my young friend would not take my intervention amiss, I did intervene, and the baby became joyful, when her mother turned to her lovingly. This mother would qualify for Winnicott’s designation of ‘ordinary devoted mother’, or rather more than that. The interchange between her and her little daughter appeared to be of great happiness, and as such an experience very familiar to both of them.
Another scene revisited. I was looking after a boy aged eighteen and a half months, while his m