Unconscious communication 1

This chapter focuses on a particular aspect of the relationship between a mother and her child: a relationship which S. Freud understood, but which has subsequently been illustrated by clinical material arising out of patients from the Holocaust. There have also been empirical observations about the effect on babies of their mothers’ internal world which the babies perceive before the external world has any substance for them. Some patients are affected by aspects of their parents’ unassimilated unconscious life, which does not seem to affect their parents’ activity or behaviour but does affect their own. In analysis it can be traced to the experience of grandparents which was bypassed by the parents, instead of being introjected and identified with, and handed on to, the children. An analyst has to understand parts of the mother’s unconscious mind, which, because the mother is not the patient, are difficult to comprehend in a reliable way.