“a conversation about unintegration, disintegration and integration”

Cathy Urwin reports on discussion in small groups following Ann Alvarez and Edna O’Shaughnessy’s papers on unintegration, disintergration and integration. Questions were raised about what is being ‘integrated’ in the infant. Of many topics covered, the greatest attention was given to the implications of the emphasis on the mother as a psychological object raised by O'Shaugnessy, an emphasis also implicit in other papers, and the impact of her state of mind on her capacity for what Winnicott called ‘maternal preoccupation’ and which Bion explored as the mother's ‘reverie’. A useful distinction was made between thinking about the baby and the situation when the mother's fantasies about the baby get in the way of this process, even in the perinatal period.

[A fuller version was published in the Child Psychotherapy Bulletin in June 2005.]