A two-month-old (!) baby is brought to the psychoanalyst. The child’s skin is covered with scabs, he is breathing heavily. The psychoanalyst reads the symptoms as symbols: the child is trying to «change skin» and stop breathing. Why?
A two-month-old (!) baby is brought to the psychoanalyst. The child’s skin is covered with scabs, he is breathing heavily. The psychoanalyst reads the symptoms as symbols: the child is trying to «change skin» and stop breathing. Why? His black mother abandoned him at the hospital — she wanted him to be adopted by a family with higher incomes and, probably, with white skin. And the baby dreams of returning to the womb, in those days when he was connected to his mother by the umbilical cord and did not breathe yet. Caroline Eljacheff recounts one after another anecdotes from her practice while working with state nurseries for children who, for one reason or another, were left without parents, and reflects: “The essence of child psychoanalysis is to feel with your own body what effect the some words and events, and then designate these sensations with words so that the words of the psychoanalyst produce, in turn, the necessary action of being. However, what can be learned from her reflections is relevant not only to psychoanalysis, but also to the very foundations of life and morality: “If a psychoanalyst “condemns”, this almost always means that he considers himself “better” than the parents of the child, whom he currently consulting. In this case, he ceases to be a doctor and becomes dangerous for the child, since he never has the right to replace a judge … «
INSTITUTE OF GENERAL HUMANITARIAN STUDIES, 208 p.