Irreparable Objects—When There's Nothing to Mend: Commentary on Paper by Anne Alvarez

It is a privilege to discuss Anne Alvarez, for her work is one of the growing points of psychoanalysis today. Her writing has a remarkable immediacy. It fits with her clinical style, which favors those moments where something is discovered between child patient and therapist because they could both bear to know it at the same time. Inviting us to accompany her as she thinks, she allows herself to use all sorts of knowledge at once: naturalistic infant-parent observation, recent infant research, countertransference experiences with the most painfully disturbed children, Kleinian psychoanalysis, and her long experience in the Autism Workshop at the Tavistock Clinic, which allows her to ask what ordinary experiences in the development of relatedness (such as reaching out and grasping) are missing in the most shut-down children. Readers of her recent book, Live Company (Alvarez, 1992), a summation of her rich and generative work to that point, will know how her work with autism helped her notice and articulate small but significant increments in the growth of personhood in all sorts of children. In this new piece she looks back, with moving candor, on early case notes to study the implicit assumptions of the way she was taught and to figure out how far she has come. Her writing is so sensible and evocative and quietly brilliant, new readers may find that it goes down almost too easily. She needs to be re-read, I find, to appreciate her originality.