ABSTRACT
It was my [J.J.] privilege to be in Esther Bick's infant observation seminar for two years during the period when she was working on her ideas about the skin, and I remember how vivid and poetic were her descriptions of an infant's terrors of falling to bits, liquefying, when in an unheld, unintegrated, quivering state of unendurable being. I doubt that anybody else has ever given such resonance to what Bion (1962b) called "nameless dread". The seminar group was constantly enthralled by her detailed analysis of the many individual dramas unfolding, moved almost to tears by her unrivalled understanding of the poignancy of an infant's pain and helplessness, and shrivelled in shame when sharply confronted by our too-ready criticisms of a mother's shortcomings and difficulties. Her few papers are a pale reflection of her immensely gifted intuitions and creative thinking in pioneering the field of infant observation.
