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In 1936, Esther Bick, a contemporary of Winnicott's, wrote her doctoral dissertation on the development of twins, which instilled in her the belief that in order to understand the development of the human personality, she should study the daily life of the infant in its home environment. This led to the method of infant observation that was then developed by the authors of this volume and Daniel Stern, among others.
Nara Amalia Caron is a medical doctor and a child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalyst; Rita Sobreira Lopes teaches developmental psychology. The psychoanalytic method of infant observation is “a royal road to the primitive in human beings,” they write, and an opportunity for analysts treating people at any age to develop the sensitive listening capacities necessary “to establish contact with the psychic phenomena of early life” (p. 7). But the beauty of their book is that they extend Bick's method, via sonograms, to intrauterine development, and the reactions to it of the prospective parents. The book consists largely of narratives that follow six infants, two singles and two sets of twins, from gestation through the third year of life.
The authors reveal a world that is at once familiar and eerily strange. We know, for example, that the two-month-old fetus has ten fingers and ten toes, that it has a clearly discernible head, mouth, eyes, and external
genitalia; but we may not have known that it can yawn, make faces, taste, swallow, go to sleep and wake up, and even, according to the authors, dream. (I am curious to know what observations reveal this.) Indeed, one of the author's conclusions is that features we attribute to postnatal life are already present in the fetus, and that fetal twins behave differently from each other, even perhaps with a dim awareness of each other's presence.
And of course we know that the fetus in every mammal is a creature nestled inside another creature, that there are, literally, two creatures in one; but we may not have