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ZBK 147:89-153 (2007)

Chapter Three. The Story of the Birth of the Next Sibling

Authors: Romana Negri, Martha Harris

Edited by: Meg Harris Williams

Feminine and Masculine Qualities

Around two years old Simone learns that his mother is expecting another baby. This produces in the life of the child a change that one could define as “catastrophic” (in the terms of Bion). Emotions of peculiar intensity trigger multiple attempts to find ways of tolerating the pain. We see him exploring various identifications, both masculine and feminine—with his farmer grandfather and his hat, cows and the birth of piglets, and his shotgun. He identifies with the mother who has a baby in her tummy. Mrs Harris brings out very clearly how Simone's curiosity about the baby stimulates his epistemophilic instinct. The importance of stories at critical moments of a child's life is very evident: how they allow the emotional experience to come to life in a poetic and imaginative way that can contain intense and baffling emotions.

Nineteenth Observation of Simone, Age Two Years, One Month, and Ten Days

RN (reads): I call at Mrs P's house on the 4th December in the morning, but there is no one at home. I go to find the father in his pharmacy; he
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tells me he is worried about his son because of the coming baby. Lately, Simone has often “telephoned” his grandfather in the country and asked him how the piglets are, and if the calf is born. (The other day, he had heard his mother talking to her father on the phone about a cow that was due to calve.) Ten days ago, Simone had again had difficult problems during the night. Yesterday, when he heard his parents talking about the new baby, he said spontaneously that he would have put him in his tummy. Last night, Simone slept in his parents' bed. At one point, early in the morning, the mother asked her husband to touch her tummy to feel the baby's movements. When the father moved to do this, he jostled against Simone, who immediately transferred himself from the bottom of the bed where he was, to a position in between his father and mother.
For some months now he has been fixated on his hair, perhaps sinc