Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Judith Kestenberg expressed her appreciation of Mrs. Furman's study of bereavement and of her contribution to the therapeutic nursery. Addressing herself to treatment via the mother, and in the light of her own research into the developmental subphase of parenthood, she wondered about the effect on the mother's self-esteem of her realization of how she had frightened the boy with her own anger. How were the interventions modified to suit the different developmental phases he was passing through? Could his mourning and body reactions be seen as manifestations of the inner genital modality, and how can one explain the absence in the child of any reference to babies? Dr. Robert J. Kabcenell raised questions about the mother's acting as therapist and the problem of dealing with the child's aggression in a family with one surviving parent. Dr. Bernard C. Meyer inquired about creativity as a response to early parental loss, citing Saint Exupéry.

Mrs. Furman acknowledged her appreciation of Dr. Kestenberg's work and felt that the material could have been formulated in terms of the inner genital phase. She added that material from the boy about babies had been left out of the presentation. The mother was in treatment with someone during part of the time she was seeing Mrs. Furman. The words used in the treatment came from the child and in this case were filtered through the mother whose empathy smoothed the whole working process. In response to Dr. Kabcenell, Mrs. Furman reviewed her experience with mother-as-therapist, indicating that the mother-nurse and mother-teacher roles are integral to childhood. This mother's unusual