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When I gave birth to my first child I wanted to take him with me into a deep cave and stay there for some weeks while we learned all about each other through sound, touch, taste and smell and by sensing the glimmers of each other's feelings. I had no doubt that we could communicate. I was a caseworker at New York Foundling Hospital for Children then, and I worked with babies.
At the Antoine Beclere Hospital in Paris, Dr. Myriam Szejer, psychoanalyst, works with infants and their parents within the maternity ward. President of La Cause des Bebes (“The Interests of the Baby”), she believes that babies are born “bathed in language” and that the talking cure can be used with neonates as well as with their parents.
Dr. Szejer dedicates Talking to Babies: Psychoanalysis on a Maternity Ward, to “all babies, newborns past and newborns present.” Szejer's ear is trained to understand baby talk and to find sensitive answers to the questions babies ask with their bodies. “There are no psychoanalysts for newborns, just as there are no psychoanalysts for adults or for children. There are only psychoanalysts, period,” Szejer claims. She helps the infant understand him or herself in relation to his or her world and she tries to reduce the possibility of misconstructions that can lead to unhappiness or maladaptations. Szejer furthermore respects the baby as a person trying to make meaning from the beginning.