ABSTRACT
Mapping beliefs and empirical findings across womb, cradle, and couch, this chapter traces the transition within the British Group of Independents towards intersubjectivity in psychoanalytic theorising. Focusing on both psychoanalytical modifications and social trends in mothering, it argues that recognition of the mother/other "object" as subject spearheads a paradigmatic shift both within the clinical process and the parent–infant exchange, now conceptualised as a bilateral meeting of minds. A crucial issue in parenting is how to survive having life and death responsibility for an unknown, preverbal and vulnerable baby. Exposure to the infant's wordless anxiety and urgent neediness has a profound effect of "contagious arousal" stimulating implicit schemas of sub-symbolic memory of their own archaic care in the carer. The chapter also argues that physiological arousal due to direct contact with evocative primary substances like amniotic fluid has an additional impact, as it actively retriggers the realm of archaic implicit experience.
