ABSTRACT
Parents' aspirations towards being able to help the developing child are affected by their own capacities to reflect on how insight is impeded or facilitated, on how understanding and thinking can be encouraged. This issue of how insight may be "impeded" or "facilitated" in the ordinary, challenging process of a person's development assumes particular importance when it comes to leaving infancy and embarking on the early childhood years. The central emotional tasks are those of weaning and separation, ones which will be forever internally worked and re-worked, whether in life generally or, for some, in the particular setting of the consulting room. The close links between the capacity for mourning and the capacity for emotional development will be explored in different ways, as the balance is traced between projective and introjective processes. The chapter provides examples conveying some aspects of these links in the complexity of two little boys' negotiations with love and loss, in relation to their Oedipal anxiety.
