13th March 2008

INTRODUCTION.
An observer who ‘enters the field’ in conducting an infant observation comes to know the infant and its care-takers directly. As it thinks about the experiences of the observer, the seminar group comes to know an experience by hearsay. An obvious point: and yet the two perceptions of experience involve different dimensions in intuition. While the observer undergoes the bewilderment of living through an often intense experience, the seminar group arrives at a knowledge unsupported by direct sense information and has to face different perplexities.

The observer is under pressure. The presence of a baby, or the presence of a space where a baby might be, arouses powerful feelings in a family. Being ‘in the field’ can inhibit the capacity, essential to observation, of being able to reverie about experience. The seminar group also has to undergo thought-inhibiting pressures, although it may find that thinking about the experiences of someone who has been in the field, without its being in the field itself, can extend the capacity to reverie.

Babies arouse envy and adoration, as well as the wish to respond to their helplessness. But the complications in feeling that arise when confronted by an actual baby are different from the complications that arise when the baby is an idea in a seminar group. The seminar group can never know the baby in any direct way and has to escape from the erroneous belief that it can know the baby, in the same way as it might know a baby by way of sense knowledge.

The idea of the baby in the seminar group has all the power that an unconscious group object can muster. A baby that is thought about, but is not directly known, is exactly like a god who can be thought about but not known. Aspects of its existence are liable to be strenuously denied; even though its existence as an idea is supported by the ‘memories in feeling’ that almost every member of the seminar group has - of siblings, offspring and, not least, of child parts of themselves.

The apportioning of a split between observer and seminar group is reminiscent of a similar apportionment in the practice of individual psychotherapy. The patient on one side of the split makes a contribution, which may be little more than a charisma of unselfconscious being, an embodiment of existence (as though the patient said ‘I am what I am, nothing more, nothing less’). The therapist on the other side of the split hopes to exercise a capacity to ‘dream about’ the patient’s contribution, in such a way that thought can translate the patient’s vitality into a system of signs. It is as though embodiment, or being, had some substrate in the sign language of hallucination that has to be sought out.

ARGUMENT. Melanie Klein makes a historical or developmental distinction concerning infancy when she describes the evolution of the depressive position out of the paranoid-schizoid position as occurring during the second quarter of the first year of life (Klein 1935 in 1975: 262-289). Granted: but Melanie Klein’s classification may turn out to have a greater significance as describing an a-spatial and a-temporal structure from which thought derives and which logically may precede the emergence of historical and developmental considerations.

Coming to know the baby as an idea rather than as an actuality may encourage the seminar group to recall W.R. Bion’s post Kleinian understanding of intuition.

Bion realised that the journey between the two positions, which includes the crossing of a disquieting threshold between them, is a perennial state (Bion 1962). It may begin at some time in the individual’s history, but the temporal metaphor of a journey is of limited value, since notions of space and time are marginal to the two positions as structural facts that exist outside space and time. Bion thought of movement between the two positions as an oscillation, persistent in states of discovery as well as in states of regression. The oscillation indicates some essential given in the nature of mind. The trauma of birth, if it is a trauma, is a version of the oscillation. It is not the starting point.

Almost in anticipation of infant observation, William Wordsworth wrote, ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:/The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,/ Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar’ (Wordsworth 1807). If the history of the foetus were to be put into reverse as a fact of the imagination, a Platonist might argue that it seems to return to a womb-like radiant space within the womb that may owe little to biological originality. In William Golding’s novel Darkness Visible a small boy walks out of a ball of fire during the London blitz, as though the core of heat had generated him.

The possibility that a preconceptive understanding of mind as originating in some light of the mind, rather than in embodiment, can arise as an idea in individual psychotherapy. In psychotic perception, body itself seems to emerge from bodily sensation. But in the rationality that I am describing, bodily experience seems to emerge from thought. It is as though experience were able to converse with the prototypes of reason.

In the beginning, there are the conjoined good objects, defined by Donald Meltzer (in discussion) as objects of radiance. The objects impel a desire for notation. Descartes wrote to a colleague: ‘I believe that the soul is always thinking for the same reason as I believe that light is always shining, even though there are not always eyes looking at it’ (Descartes 1642). An emotional turbulence arises: Bion’s oscillation between the two positions. Out of turbulence may stem an experience and knowledge of body.

The observer in the field and the seminar group will begin by engaging with the actuality in which the new-born lives. Obviously it is important to strengthen the down-to-earth aspects of the observer’s relationship to the field and to endorse the fact that cogency of insight depends on an element of common-sense in perception. But it is important, too, that the seminar group should be invited to share the experience of another type of perception - that of being agents for the ‘eyes of the mind’, for reason itself, by being attentive to intuitions of a preconceptive kind, concerning structures in thought that are like forms in music.

Thinking of this kind is characteristic of myth, and I shall trace its influence on an observation brought to a certain seminar group.

THE FISH MOBILE. The observer met the family before the birth of Anna and brought the observation to the group. I shall allude to this observation in passing. She made an observation after the birth which she did not present to the group, and then an observation which she did present.

Anna is twelve days old. Joseph lets me in (Joseph is aged eleven and is Anna’s one sibling). Anna’s mother is sitting over Anna, who is feeding quietly at the right breast. Mother explains that Anna started crying badly half way home from school - they had been collecting Joseph - and that she rushed her back under her coat with Joseph pushing the pram home.

Joseph goes to fetch the sweets that I brought for him last week, and offers me one, then offers the bag to his mother who asks him to unwrap one and to pop it in her mouth.

Joseph points out the fish mobile that he has made. I now realise that he had been making the fish mobile during my first visit, before Anna had been born.

During the first visit, Joseph had been busy working with pen and paper and scissors, and the observer had had no clue as to what he had been making; and this sense of mystery had seemed to reflect the sense of an event that was about to happen (the birth of Anna).

During the feed Anna strains and seems to have a bowel motion. Mum says that the trouble now is that she has got herself all upset and is now feeding and probably windy. But in fact she probably is hungry as she didn’t have much before she went out, and she’s gone an hour and a half. Mum says that Anna has to fit into a routine unlike Joseph did.

Anna comes off the right breast in some distress. The observer takes note that Anna ‘strains’ and ‘seems to have a bowel motion’ under the influence of her mother’s anxiety; or at least her mother is anxious, and Anna has had a bowel motion. Mother has had to race to school with Anna to collect Anna’s elder brother Joseph and now has hoped to feed her to make her less anxious. While mother feeds Anna, Joseph pops a consolatory sweet into his mother’s mouth.

In a remark of some resonance, Anna’s mother says that Anna has a way of coming off the breast when upset that suggests she may have forgotten it, or does not know where it is, or has rejected it. Her response to the ‘upset’ is to suppose that Anna, as the second child, has not as yet had time to realise that she ‘has to fit into a routine.’ On first phoning the observer, she had apologised for her baby because, she said, ‘this was a second baby’. The observer told the seminar group, ‘I may have compounded that feeling of second-best by saying honestly that I didn’t have a choice.’ Mother was glad to take her on (the observer was to learn) because of the family’s good experience with a first observer, a speech therapist who had helped them all by her presence and whose capacity for observation may have fostered Joseph’s precocity in speech. ‘I wondered what gifts they expected from me,’ the second observer thought ruefully.

Sue Reid (in discussion) has suggested that the notion of ‘second best’ works against any understanding of the obvious fact that every baby is unique. In this context, being second best probably means being a girl. (We never learn why Anna’s mother has had all the time in the world for Joseph but has so little time for Anna.)

The re-iteration of secondness invites comparison with some idealised conception of the foetus’s relationship to the umbilical cord, in which functions of feeding and evacuation are not necessarily separated or liable to interruption.
Joseph translucently reflects the family’s phantasies and feelings. On first seeing him, the observer had noted that he looked like his father; but her observation brought out the extent to which Joseph seemed to be immersed in his mother’s pregnancy. Much of the hostility that Joseph might reasonably have felt at the birth of the new baby was avoided by his immersion; he might have been in a couvade, or phantom pregnancy state, as his mother realises. She says that Joseph is ‘a bit full’ of himself; he ‘has really got into the pregnancy’. She adds: ‘He has read all the books (on pregnancy)’.

It is as though Joseph had become confused with an idea of the foetus. His state of confusion has only begun to be shaken a little by his first meetings with an actual sister. He cannot really see her, nor can his mother, because they are lost in an idea which both of them believe can have only one embodiment - as a boy (and a specific boy at that, Joseph) rather than as a girl (Anna).

Joseph possibly speaks for his mother’s intuitions, most noticeably so when the observer, on first meeting the family before Anna’s birth, had observed his making of the fish mobile, without understanding what he was about. Later in this same first observation, Joseph’s mother had talked about puzzling over some ultrasound photographs of Anna in utero, which she thought disparagingly of as being like ‘a toddler’s picture, in which people have the head pointed out and then say ‘oh yes, how very nice.’ Mother’s looking into the womb, by way of the ultrasound, echoes Joseph’s need to construct an imaginary or dream-like image of the womb, the fish mobile made as a gift for a baby that is to be and yet is unknown, like a preconception that awaits realisation, or a thought in the mind of the seminar group.
By the fact that it does not have the experiential knowledge of the observer, the seminar group is in a position to see with ‘the eyes of the mind’ the significance of the fish mobile as an actual event that has a strong dream component to it. As a dream representation, the fish mobile depicts poetically, as depressive threshold symbols tend to do, the fundamental mystery or ambivalence of life and death as presences in the mind.

We can now see the significance of the relationship of doubling to the theme of otherness. The eyes of actual perception are to ‘the eyes of the mind’ as the actual infant is to the imaginary twin in the breast, who carries an other-worldly capacity to tolerate the existence of some essential mystery to life and death.

Joseph speaks for the family, and in particular for his mother, through his making of the gift, as though for a baby in a manger.

The fish mobile should symbolise the realisation of an inner world depressive space, in which the idea of the otherness of the imaginary twin can be tolerated. But in fact, Joseph’s gift is not used in the service of Anna; it is used as a defence against realising a jealousy that is on the verge of being activated by her unique claims on life. Although this realisation cannot be tolerated, its meaning is evident as an unconsciously shared family phantasy, at the time when Anna reaches the second breast.

Anna comes off the first breast in some distress, and her mother says that she is not sure whether Anna ‘forgets’ the breast, or somehow loses it, or just doesn’t want it. (In the same way as mother and Joseph want to ‘forget’ the unique particularity of the second baby.) At this moment, Anna’s mother and Joseph are more distanced than Anna is from an idea of integrating goodness. Caught up in a phantasy about the meaning of Anna’s bowel motion, they share states of mind that are characterised by an absence of moderation.

Anna’s mother says ‘it’s alright Anna, it’s alright’ and holds her close. Anna’s mother is trying to wind her and takes her upstairs for a nappy change. On the way upstairs she turns up the thermostat, saying that her husband is worried about overheating, and 65 degrees is now recommended because of cot death.

On the changing mat Anna looks at the window and ‘moves rhythmically and alternately’ and ‘makes little noises in her throat.’ She now carries the mystery of otherness. What do her movements mean, if anything? Is she trying to hold onto an internal good that she has projected onto the world outside her? But mother and Joseph are unable to see her at this moment. Rather, Joseph feigns perturbation at the ‘orange-coloured poo’; and mother and he enter into a crescendo of anxiety concerning the theme of being pushed out, or denied rights. Since Anna’s birth, says Joseph, he has had to use his parents’ toilet, though why he has had to do so is not clear; and Anna’s mother talks about a sewer failure, and about a neighbour whose toilet had been blocked. Things are getting out of hand and, as though to get a grip on herself, Anna’s mother says that she uses liners and terry-towel nappies which date from Joseph’s time.

When Anna begins to scream, Joseph seems to become genuinely persecuted. He puts his hands over his ears, rushes away and lies on his parents’ bed with a pillow over either ear. It is as though the screaming and defecating were equated with the act of Anna’s conception, perhaps in this very bed. Feeding and hearing in the actual world entails being able to take in a sibling’s screams: the insistence of new life to be acknowledged.

In the conjectures of the seminar group, the thought of Joseph with pillows over his ears is as dreamlike as the image of the fish mobile. Imagination might see the image of Joseph with his ears covered as though through an enfilade of rooms, or as existing within the incoherent spaces that typify the labile space-time intuitions of the depressive threshold.

In certain contexts, the ‘eyes of the mind’ have the magnifying powers of a telescope or microscope. I take this counter-transference response to contain an understanding about the changes in psychic space that the activity of birth stirs up in the phantasies of a family involved in the experience of an actual birth.

In the observation group, as it thinks about the material, psychic meaning can manifest itself as though alternating through either a microscope or telescope. It is as though this unsecured type of perception (oral in origin, I suspect) were a prerequisite for being able to ‘see’ by way of the ‘eye of the mind’. Intuitions of this kind oscillate between microcosmic and macrocosmic conceptions of understanding.

A new baby invites the thought that it, a minute particular, is the whole world: it invites thinking that is close to the concrete equation thinking that Hanna Segal has described as psychopathological (Segal 1957), but that can be on occasion (as here) used in the service of development. On this point, microcosm is macrocosm, as the earliest cosmologists used to believe.

Many families find themselves on the threshold as they undergo the creative turbulence of meeting up with the otherness of a new life - and extraordinary conceptions of space and time can be evidence of the depressive threshold. The observer, as opposed to the seminar leader, is seldom in the position to acknowledge this sort of response; ‘having an actual experience,’ and being bombarded by it, can inhibit the capacity to receive this type of insight. The seminar group acknowledges the truth in actuality in the description of a circumstance, while at the same time ‘seeing’ quite different lines of thought for exploration.

Mother now takes a hold on the situation: she sends off Joseph to finish his homework and brings Anna to the second breast, from which Anna feeds keenly.

Anna cries a little at the end of her feed, and her mother helps to settle her by putting on a tape recording of the kind of sounds that a foetus might hear in the womb. Arguably, Anna’s mother is trying to fob off Anna once more. To that extent, she is misusing her intuition. But perhaps she lacks confidence in the power of the breast to settle little girls as well as little boys.

Anna is quiet - half awake and half asleep - and then her face creases up and she cries quite suddenly. Her mother puts on a tape of womb noises, and Anna seems to relax very quickly and to fall asleep, hanging over her mother’s arms. Her mother says that the tape seems to work and that classical music has the same effect.

This is to think of classical music as a type of sedation, used to control the mind rather than to open it to the truth. Ideas that genuinely belong to the inner world are powerful forms of good, but they can be abused. For instance: cultures haunted by ideas at the expense of being attuned to actualities tend to be oppressive of individuality, even though the ideas are valuable in themselves.

And yet Anna’s mother does have an intuition so stimulating that it lead to the writing of this paper. Linking classical music to womb sounds indicates an understanding of a way in which the earliest self may delight in its good objects as a type of proportionality. A passion for music or mathematics may grow out of such a delight.

As the tape of womb sounds continues, Anna’s mother mentions bringing Anna home a few days before - in a way that anticipates, but in a more happy key, the anxious homecoming of today. She and her husband had enjoyed giving Anna a bath, and Anna had enjoyed the bath too. It was as though, through womb sounds and music and water and the experience of Anna entering sleep drowsily, mother and the observer had been allowed a glimpse of the unknowable core to the dream element. Hopefully the seminar group is sensitive to this unknowable core.

CONCLUSION. The mysterious and radiant environment of the new-born creates a formidable field for the observer to travel into.

Imaginatively identified with the foetus, the seminar group may see the observer as the foetus’s own later infant self, hesitantly contemplating a new world and looking to find its anchorage in its foetal past. The intrepidity of the observer may put the seminar group in mind of early navigators sailing through uncharted waters.

In relation to the actions of other members of the family, the new-born (as when it looks at the light from a window or turns its head) has a metaphysical ‘depth’ that is mysterious; it seems to be looking for something, and to embody something, which the actual world can only reflect uncertainly.

I conjecture that what it is looking for is something that comes from a world of non naturalistic proto-spatial and proto-temporal intuitions that is relatable only secondarily to foetal intuition.

The seminar group, and possibly the observer, may sense how close the infant is to the radiance of the good objects. The observer, blitzed by sensation and erroneous advice from ‘bad’ figures from within, is under pressure to think in terms of a delusional certainty that derives from a misunderstanding of empiricism. The seminar group, on the other hand, may feel an appeal that is related to the evolution of sign systems that occur within the non successive and often ‘alien’ spatial conceptions of dream thought.

Freud wrote in Moses and Monotheism of an ‘intellectuality’ drained of ‘sensory perception’ that is required to contemplate a God who has ‘neither a name nor a countenance’ (Freud 1939: 113). ‘Intellectuality’ is a native endowment, a structure in reasoning which the foetus can intuit, one of the earliest forms by which good objects articulate meaning to the mind.

The seminar group has some responsibility to strengthen the down-to-earth, common-sense inclinations of the observer, while at the same time bearing witness to the fact that thought actually exists and that mind is structured in an ‘intellectuality’ that contemplates an articulation ‘without a name or a countenance’. An experience of the actual in itself, without the dream element (if this can be imagined), would be unable to convey the experience of mind being able to come to suffer the nature of its own unknowability.

REFERENCES
Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
Descartes, R. (1642) Letter to Gibieuf. 19 January. In Kenny 1970.
Freud, S. (1939) Moses and Monotheism. Standard Edition 23. London: The Hogarth Press.
Golding, W. (1979) Darkness Visible. London: Faber & Faber.
Kenny, A. (1970) Descartes’ Philosophical Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Klein, M. (1935) ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ in The Writings of Melanie Klein. Volume 1.
Klein M. (1975) The Writings of Melanie Klein. Volume 1. London: Hogarth Press.
Segal, H. (1957) ‘Notes on Symbol Formation’ in International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 38: 391-397.
Wordsworth, W. 1807 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.’ In Poems in Two Volumes.

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