Emerging life: an essay about rhythms of encounters and missed encounters in the parent–infant early interactions

Abstract

This paper uses an infant observation to illustrate the ways in which a mother and baby couple come together postnatally, and in particular through feeding. The moments of ‘encounter’ are linked with concepts such as the ‘dance’ between mother and baby, in which rhythm and mutual observation regulate the intensity and satisfactory feeling of contact. In this way baby and mother negotiate their developing relationship and their sense of well-being and trust. The state of mind of the mother is highly significant, and in the baby observation, it is clear at times that the mother’s own anxiety, past trauma and the experience of severe postnatal depression impacted on her capacity to be close and receptive with her second child, who begins to regurgitate milk regularly. There is – a ‘not coming together’ a lot of the time and it seems this might have been inadvertently made worse by the fact that maternal grandmother had most of the care for the baby at the beginning. The baby when with his mother seems to take in a lot of his mother’s unconscious, undigested feelings which are experienced as unsettling and he cannot keep in the given milk. The link between body and mind, soma and psyche is illustrated and discussed.

Keywords:

• psychosomatic
• maternal depression
• regurgitation
• undigested emotions
• intersubjectivity
• maternal trauma

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Teresa Lyon trained in Chile at Universidad Católica and Universidad de Chile as a Clinical Psychologist and Child Psychotherapist. She has an MSc in Developmental Psychoanalytic Psychology at the Anna Freud National Centre, UK and is currently training for a clinical associateship at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London. She has extensive experience in clinical practice with infants, children and their families in Chile and in London and her main interest is the study of infant Mental Health from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Notes

1. All the names have been changed to maintain confidentiality.