The emergence of depressive pain (French: souffrance): psychoanalytic infant observation applied to babies in institutions

Abstract

In this article the author draws attention to the possibility of working with painfully deprived children within an institution, in this case a baby-care unit for infants awaiting adoption. Understanding primitive levels of identification of the sort revealed by Esther Bick allowed the therapist here being supervised to help a tiny girl who was one and a half at the beginning of the treatment to make progress until she was two and a half, when she was able to leave her on the threshold of the depressive position – which means having acquired the capacity to internalise the image of her therapist and to rely upon it. This article therefore aims to demonstrate the possibility and great usefulness of early treatment in institutions, whether in a crèche or in a baby-care unit. Institutional reactions connected with the progress of the treatment and then with its ending must always be taken into account, in so far as emotions that come alive in the transference-counter-transference relationship are echoed in the institution itself.

Keywords:

• adhesion
• clinging
• identification
• internalisation
• link
• depressive position
• representation

Acknowledgements

Translated by Daphne Briggs, Oxford, February 2012.

Notes

1. ‘He’ and ‘his’ are used here to designate a baby of either sex in order to avoid clumsy circumlocutions and potential confusion with the baby's mother [DB].