ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic child therapists are uniquely suited to differentiating childhood development qualities, and Frances Tustin in particular offers one clues to what it may be like to live stuck between two worlds such as fetal life and infant life. This chapter presents details of an hour of observation of an extremely premature infant whom Tustin followed weekly for the first three years, and then monthly for the fourth and fifth years, according to the Tavistock model of infant observation. The caesura of birth assumes an infant 'capable of being born', even though early states of mind are still somewhat fluid. The extremely premature infant is not born but nearly annihilated by a demand to survive. Tustin trying to categorize extremely premature infants as 'normal or pathological' might blur one understanding of what is as yet beyond one intellectual comprehension as it represents a brave new world, especially in regard to long-term psychological outcome.
