ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates a baby's "broken bridge to the parents" which when intact would allow the baby to look towards the parents, smile, vocalise, and display emotional states such as sadness, worry, anxiety, and happiness. A child with early developmental difficulties such as Jon's can be therapeutically helped through "the adults appropriately sensing and responding to the child's rudimentary attempts to formulate and express his current mental state, his intentions and wishes". The parents' capacities to mentally represent their childhood experiences correlate with infants' security of attachment. If the parents used primitive mechanisms of defence such as splitting, projecting, and massive denial in relation to their own emotional experiences, this would impede the parents from being sensitively understanding of their infant's "thinking, feeling, wishing, believing, wanting, desiring". The observer experienced the projections of mother's anxiety with which mother didn't seem able to remain in contact.
