Talking to Babies: Psychoanalysis on the Maternity Ward

The Paris-based president of La Cause des Bebes (The Interests of the Baby), Szejer is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and she opens her book with a compelling case anecdote of a new mother who draws the blinds to her room, shuts the lights, and claims that in the two days since her birth, her infant hasn't urinated. It is Szejer's gift to not only dramatize the situation clearly and with gravity, but to proceed with a caution that allows the anxious mother to locate apposite sources of trauma in her own childhood. From there come six chapters exploring everything from""A Closer Look at the Baby Blues"" to""The Child Given Up at Birth,"" from the perspectives of child, mother, and (often) hospital nursing staff, and more often involving the present than the past. Szejer writes with a clear, calm, unpretentious authority similar to that of Mary Pipher, and is able to use her experiences working at Antoine Beclere Hospital, which had some of the first""kangaroo units"" (for early parent-child bonding with at-risk infants) in France, as springboards to talking about everything from the effects of the death of one twin in the womb on the one born alive (as well as therapies for both the surviving child and the parents) to a newborn's refusal to eat, to racism's role in parent-child relations.