Dreaming birth for an unborn child: poetic memories of Winnicott’s ‘mirror role of mother and family’ and Tarkovsky’s film Mirror

ABSTRACT

In the course of a psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a five-year-old girl with cerebral palsy and profound developmental delay, there came a time when my reverie experiences often included memories of Tarkovsky’s autobiographical cinematic free-verse Mirror. These reverie experiences became forms in which I was able to contain the patient’s state of nothingness associated with her undifferentiated state, and to recognise her urgent need for mirroring of her very existence. In response to these reveries, I came to think of Winnicott’s ideas on mirroring. I propose the idea that birth can be understood as a trope of the most primordial sense of mirroring, created by the link with a subjective object. I describe the ways in which failures in the caregiver’s reverie hamper the infant’s psychological birth, which relies on good-enough mirroring for him to experience himself in the caregiver’s responses to him. When this fails, what emerges is a chimeric ghost-self, a self merged with the caregiver’s trauma or loss. This chimeric ghost is a product of the distortions in the reflected image. The infant will not be able to be born as himself until he can differentiate from the ghost. In order to avoid identification with the ghost, the nature of the parental trauma needs to be understood by patient and therapist, each helping the other in this transformative experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Winnicott
• Ogden
• mirroring
• Tarkovsky
• reverie
• psychological birth

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Maria Papadima, the Editor of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, for her generosity and creativity, which gave life to this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The child patient’s parents have read this work, and they have granted permission to use the clinical material and publish this article.