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13th January 1967.
Dear Mrs. Aitken,
Thank you for writing me and for reading my book. I hope you will be able to take it that the general tendency of what I write has to do with there being no actual right and wrong. For instance, there is this matter of your husband's looking after the baby. No-one
can say this is either right or wrong. Perhaps if you have several babies he will want to do this with one and not with another. The only way that babies can reach anything consistent in their environment is when the parents are able to be themselves. I do agree, however, that it is very interesting to see the effect of these details on children. For instance, he will have quite a job at some point in changing around from being maternal into being a third person in a triangle, something new. From your letter I feel fairly confident that things are going well, and certainly I do not feel a need to try to make you worry about the future.
In regard to the beginning, I wonder why you did not see the child for four days; perhaps you were exhausted. I am asking, however, because it is really terrible that really good doctors and nurses seem to be unable to leave to the mother the early stages of making a relationship. It seems to be impossible to teach doctors and nurses this one thing, that the basis of good feeding is the relationship that begins to develop between the mother and the baby. It is only too easy to imagine awful nurses and I must not jump to conclusions, but it seems to me that you could have managed the early relationship to the baby if you had been left to it and at the same time cared for properly in respect of physical nursing and doctoring. You seem to have come through this difficult phase and I hope you will be able to leave it aside now as a thing of the past. Naturally it would have been nice if all had gone well from the beginning, but at any rate for the time being you have reached some kind of equilibrium and I expect this will continue; anyhow I ho