ABSTRACT
Marianne Moore ends her great poem ‘The Pangolin’ with the way each dawn steadies man’s soul with new hope (Moore, 1968). This chapter contains some reflections on the treatment of unsteady and unsteadied children. In the late 1960s Esther Bick made a very interesting, but controversial, distinction between helpless unintegration and defensive disintegration through splitting processes for defensive purposes (Bick, 1968). A source of some confusion is that at some moments when she referred to helpless unintegration, she referred to it simply as a state (she even mentioned ‘fluctuations’ in this state). At other moments, however, she referred to it as characteristic of the primary phase of development. In 2004, at a conference for teachers of infant observation, Joan Symington apparently agreed with Bick on the notion of this as the primary phase (or stage) of development (Symington, 2004; see also Symington, 2002). There followed considerable debate about this subject (O’Shaughnessy, 2006).
