ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the vibrancy of an infant observation undertaken in Mumbai, both of the young child and of his mother trying to fit themselves into family life while living through a mother's severe feelings of loss around weaning. It discusses the observation in the context of understanding the family within wider systems and touches on the use of different psychoanalytic ways of reading this. The chapter looks at the detailed observational accounts of a mother and baby in a traditional joint family where the mother and her sister-in-law are living together in the paternal grandparents' home. It reviews the material using some psychoanalytic concepts to think about the pattern of the evolving mother–baby/caregiver relationships. S. Kakar and S. M. Kurtz made the point that the Indian child is encouraged from earliest infancy to be shared by the female members of the extended family.
