Ghosts in the Nursery and Wolves at the Door. By Richard Duggins, pp.  77-88.

Duggins writes of the observation of an infant and his parents during the first year of the baby's life. The infant, Rory, is the child of an unmarried, working-class couple, each of whom is burdened by a traumatic past and current economic insecurity. Duggins describes the vicissitudes of Rory's development over the course of the observation, focusing on the initially persecutory anxiety that pervaded the family, the struggles of Rory's mother to maintain emotional closeness with her infant, and the difficulties of Rory's father in managing his sadistic and intrusive impulses toward his son. He cites Fraiberg in discussing how unconscious factors can overwhelm both parents and cause them to act out in abandoning or aggressive ways.8

Duggins points to the appearance of second-skin phenomena in Rory at moments of extreme emotional abandonment by his parents (see footnote 1, p. 969). The author also describes gradual changes that occur over the course of the year: the diminution of the persecutory atmosphere in the family, the beginning evidence of a triadic relationship