ABSTRACT
This paper by Helga Coulter presents in a powerful way her experience of observing as a trainee psychotherapist in London in the late 1980s, and her dilemma about whether or not to intervene when she felt the baby was being put at risk by an epileptic mother. She felt that she became a transference figure for the mother, representing aspects of the distant mother of the baby’s mother, and that the baby’s mother also experienced her as a potentially unhelpful mother-in-law, and for Coulter something unconsciously felt to be imminently dangerous to mother and infant was communicated by projective identification. The observer was guided to maintain an observer role of abstinence, while a mother may expect that the observer would comment if they had observed something worrying. The observer was aware of repressing all kinds of concerns. However, a serious event occurred at this time, the mother who suffered from epileptic fits on a regular basis fell over when the infant was six weeks old and the infant suffered a broken skull. This was predicted in a remarkable countertransference dream about an infant with a damaged skull, which Coulter dreamt before learning the infant was injured.
