Talking to Babies instructively transmits teachings relating to psychoanalysis and newborns.  The mantra of the author, Myriam Szejer, is that newborns want to be listened to; and that psychoanalysis rightfully is an important part of the panoply of healing approaches pertinent to newborns.  Szejer is a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with over a decade of experience working in the maternity ward of a hospital in France.  She is also the president of an entity named "The Interests of the Baby", bent on cross fertilizing the views of the respective realms of research, practical medicine, and psychoanalysis.  With artful grace, Szejer interweaves vital lessons culled from her professional experiences with germane research efforts of others so as to produce an intellectually vibrant work which represents an important contribution to the literature, in the still fallow research field of psychoanalysis and newborns.

Anecdotal fragments of real life cases are insinuated interestingly and informatively, by Szejer, into the textual body.  A cardinal belief, of Szejer, is that psychoanalysts should listen, and speak, to newborns.  And, in an engrossing way, anecdotal snippets of actual comments made by Szejer to particular newborns are grafted into the text.  These anecdotal samples show that Szejer, when speaking to newborns, practices a psychoanalytic communications approach deftly commingling elements of honesty, sincerity, hopefulness, and sympathy.  More of such snippets would likely have endowed the book with an even greater measure of the awesome strength emanating characteristically from real life details.  Textually empowering doses, of bits and pieces of conversations between Szejer and parents of newborns, also are injected absorbingly into the text's body.

Stylistically, the book is tailored so as to more closely fit the specialist rather than the lay reader.  The text is drenched with professional language tethered to psychoanalysis, which has the practical effect of casting a pall of stylistic abstruseness over the text.

Six chapters, structurally, comprise the mainstay textual foundation of the book.  Additionally, a "preface" admiringly, if tersely, comments on Szejer's daring approach of psychoanalyzing newborns.  Also preceding the chapters is an "introduction", in which Szejer expertly interprets the respective scenes of an attention gathering psychoanalytic drama, involving a mother and her newborn.  At the text's far end, further structural support is provided for the book by a succinct "epilogue", and by a modest number of research "Notes", which may helpfully facilitate further study of psychoanalysis and newborns.

In Chapter One, Szejer plunges immediately into the turbid waters obscuring psychoanalysis and newborns.  Prospective readers should understand that this intellectually delectable book is replete with the pensive, psychoanalytic centric musings, of Szejer.  In this chapter, Szejer ardently espouses the view that a psychoanalyst, in pursuit of newborn healing, must attempt to let voices be heard, including the voice of a newborn as well as the voices of a newborn's mother and father.  The belief of Szejer is that a psychoanalyst must attempt to hear all three.  The mother-newborn-father triad importantly enframes the textual discussion.  The importance of speaking appropriate words, to a newborn, is emphasized likewise.

There is a sort of abstractly surreal conceptual aura enveloping the beliefs of Szejer, concerning psychoanalysis and newborns.  As adumbrated conceptually, in Chapter Two, Szejer believes that a newborn is born before being born, in the sense that the newborn's life actually commenced about nine months earlier.  And more, the newborn knows this, and it is meaningful for the newborn.  A metaphor employed, by Szejer, is that:  intrauterine life is a dress rehearsal, with the mother as director; and birth is a premiere.  Szejer believes, further, that babies are born with a fully intact sensorial foundation, and she admonishes that it is extremely important to maintain, at birth, auditory-tactile contact between a newborn and its parents.

Although Szejer gamely endeavors to contribute helpful pieces to the puzzling interface of psychoanalysis and neurobiology, with respect particularly to newborns, plainly, more research, focusing on psychoanalysis and newborns, is sorely needed.  In Chapter Three, Szejer grapples tenaciously with issues appertaining to language, speech, and memory in newborns.  Research efforts linked to these respective areas are summarized excellently.  There is much fruitful substance to be imbibed from this intellectually nurturing chapter.  But, as Szejer indicates clearly, speech, language, and memory, regarding newborns, are areas requiring additional investigation.

The crux of Chapter Four is to explicate some of the rudiments affecting the work of a psychoanalyst ensconced in a maternity ward.  In workaday fashion, Szejer works tediously to construct a sturdy framework for maternity ward, psychoanalytic work.

Insightfully penetrating examination of the "baby blues", occurring very predictably on about the third or fourth day after birth, is the gist of Chapter Five.  A mother crying "too much", or a crying mother saying "I don't know why", are manifestations of the "blues".  The intriguing phenomenon of the baby blues is meticulously and revealingly dissected and examined, by Szejer, with respect to a newborn, and a newborn's mother and father.  For Szejer, study of all three is important with regard to fathoming enigmas enshrouding the blues.

So-called "confidential childbirth", in which a newborn is left by its biologic parents to institutional care from birth until adoption, is the cynosure of concluding Chapter Six.  In a rather sobering way, Szejer discourses on how confidential childbirth constitutes a kind of psychoanalytic emergency, necessitating prompt intervention.  Technical discussion of variant topics joined to confidential childbirth is mixed with comment on pertinent law, in France, concerning this phenomenon.

Critically, this impressive book bristles with nettlesome questions.  For instance, are the psychoanalytic experiences of Szejer, working in a French maternity ward, in any way anomalous?  Can the results of these anecdotally described experiences be extrapolated reliably to a larger population of newborns?  Szejer explains, importantly, that, for the purpose of psychoanalytic healing, she talks to newborns.  But critics of this word-based approach to newborn healing may complain that the book is considerably short on details relevant to the developing of expert communications skills for this purpose.  The devil, in short, may be in the fine details of how, effectually, to healingly intervene with newborns in a manner dependent heavily on words.  For the critic, the ruminations, of Szejer, may be approached best with open mindedness tinged, as well, with a salutary measure of skepticism.

The gamut of readers who may be edified greatly by this superb book reaches to:  psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, neuroscientists, obstetricians, neonatal nurses, social workers, and pediatricians.

© 2007 Leo Uzych

Leo Uzych (based in Wallingford, PA) earned a law degree, from Temple University; and a master of public health degree, from Columbia University.  His area of special professional interest is healthcare.

Categories: Psychology