An absorbing and thought-provoking book, which will resonate with the imagination of many readers, and which certainly should be in the hands of any medical professionals who work with babies and pregnant women.
Catherine Vanier draws on twenty years of analytic work in a neonatal intensive care unit to ask what premature birth does to the psyche of the infant, the family, and the staff who keep the baby alive. She sets the medical fact of survival beside another question: how a baby born so early, so dependent on machines, comes to take up a place as a subject.
Working case by case, Vanier shows how attention to what is said and left unsaid around the incubator bears on a baby's clinical course, and how the analyst finds a position within a medical team without displacing the doctors. She writes from a Lacanian frame, treating even the newborn as caught up in the speech and desire of those nearby.
For the clinician, it offers a close account of analytic listening in a setting governed by urgency and technology, and of holding a place for the subject when life itself remains uncertain.
About the author
Catherine Vanier
Catherine Vanier is a French psychoanalyst working in the Lacanian tradition. She holds a doctorate in psychology and is a member and former president of the Espace Analytique association in Paris. She is known for bringing psychoanalytic work into neonatal intensive care, practising for many years in the neonatology service of the Hopital Delafontaine in Saint-Denis alongside extremely premature babies and their families. She also presides over Enfance en Jeu and has written on childhood, including Premature Birth.
Details
- 2015
- 2015
- French
- Lindsay Watson
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 276
- 9781782201212