Ghosts in the nursery. A psychoanalytic approach to the problems of impaired infant-mother relationships
Fraiberg, S.; Adelson, E.; Shapiro, V.
Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 14(3): 387-421
1975
ISSN/ISBN: 0002-7138 PMID: 1141566 Document Number: 4178
In every nursery there are ghosts. They are the visitors from the unremembered past of the parents; the uninvited guests at the christening. Under all favorable circumstances the unfriendly and unbidden spirits are banished from the nursery and return to their subterranean dwelling place. The baby makes his own imperative claim upon parental love and, in strict analogy with the fairy tales, the bonds of love protect the child and his parents against the intruders, the malevolent ghosts. This is not to say that ghosts cannot invent mischief from their burial places. Even among families where the love bonds are stable and strong, the intruders from the parental past may break through the magic circle in an unguarded moment, and a parent and his child may find themselves reenacting a moment or a scene from another time with another set of characters. Such events are unremarkable in the family theater, and neither the child nor his parents nor their bond is necessarily imperiled by a brief intrusion. It is not usually necessary for the parents to call upon us for clinical services.
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