ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein has suggested that the pain of the experience of birth, along with inescapable feelings of need and frustration, precipitate the baby into a state of fear of dying. In order to survive, the Kleinian baby is innately equipped to project this deep distress, along with the part of the self that feels it, into the mother's mind, thus establishing a bad persecutory breast outside. The deflected fear of dying searches greedily for a mind that can weave it into a fabric of meaning, thus taming its deathly quality. Dr Steinberg reports that she felt safe enough to let herself be in the fragments of inchoate meaning that Hans was producing, and the author shall soon see her taking the next step, namely transforming her findings into words, with which she would bathe Hans. Hans's unfortunate beginning seemed to have arrested his mental development almost at its inception.
