ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shares her understanding of how observing, reflecting upon, and experiencing an anguished infant's use of the primitive processes of dissociation, adhesive identification, and primitive omnipotence facilitates psychoanalytic psychotherapy with adult patients who have suffered infantile deprivations. She describes ways to use observations of infants to elucidate psychoanalytic psychotherapy with two adult patients. The author also describes the patient and then shows the connection with an observation of an infant's emotional experience. She discusses another patient in psychoanalytic psychotherapy whose anxieties and unhappiness were elucidated by the study of infants in a neonatal intensive care unit. The author shows how insufficient maternal containment and resulting primitive protections were elucidated and expressed by two adults in psychotherapy. Through the experience of infant observation, the author began to understand how these adults' use of primitive protections may have been essential for their survival.
