ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on both the mother's internal perspective and its effect on her developing infant. It suggests that both involve unacknowledged ambivalence denied aggression and/or desire. However, persecutory experiences pivot on a sense of externalised threat/s: paranoid ideas often associated with the baby, self-pity, projection and/or assorted phobias including contamination fears, claustrophobia or agoraphobia. The chapter describes that each type of early parental distress is precipitated by a combination of two components. The components are reactivation, in the baby care context, not only of oedipal but also of unresolved infantile issues and selective reaction to disparities between parental aspirations and psychosocial realities of postnatal experience. The chapter presents a single-case anamnesis to illustrate some of these processes. It proposes that the key to postnatal distress lies in re-evocation of unprocessed traumatic infantile experience through exposure to raw forces in the newborn.
