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15th January 1957.
Dear Dr. Kulka:
At last I have been able to read your paper “Kinesthetic Needs and Motility in Earliest Infancy” several times. Naturally you wished for a comment from me in October. What I want to say
now is more of a general comment of appreciation than a criticism of detail. I find your paper very interesting. Your references to the literature seem to me to be relevant and helpful to those who may want to be led towards the same subject. By the way, have you read the paper—“Importance du rôle de la motricité dans la relation d'objet” (Pierre Marty et Michael Fain), based on a paper read at the Congress of psycho-analysts who speak French and Italian which is held in the autumn in Paris? This paper was given in 1955. I am not sure how far it overlaps with your own work.
Personally I am most interested in the study of the movements in premature infants which give an indication of what happens in the foetal state which indicates life and liveliness. For instance, it has often come my way in an analysis to interpret a snake not as a phallic symbol but as a symbol of the infant's whole self as represented in the body and body movements that are characteristic round the birth date. You seem to me to be dealing with this difficult problem of the infant's task, and therefore the task of those who are caring for the infant, which is to gather up as much as possible of whatever there is of the early vitality into the general service of love and hate. No doubt there is always a certain residue of the earliest activities and muscular urges which is never assimilated to the whole means of expression, and one of the most difficult things I find in analyses is the technique for dealing with unassimilated destructive or aggressive or simply vital urges which turn up clinically in the form of maniacal attacks or more commonly in the form of an inability on the part of the patient to relax. Vigilance has to be maintained against the maniacal episode.
I think that