Selma Fraiberg, Edna Adelson și Vivian Shapiro

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1. 01

   A parent repeats on their child what was done to them not because they remember the pain but precisely because they do not: what was felt and then buried gets reproduced, what was felt and then told stops.

   Ghosts in the Nursery · 1975

   What gets passed on is not the memory but the defence against the feeling that came with it.

   Fraiberg worked with very young, poor mothers whose babies were in real danger of neglect. Her central observation is counter-intuitive. The mothers who told the harshest stories about their own childhood — beatings, abandonment, fear — were not the ones who repeated. The ones who repeated told it coldly, said «it was normal, that is how children were raised then», and felt nothing while saying it. Fraiberg put the rule this way: what is transmitted is not the memory of the abuse but the defence against the feeling that went with it. Someone who can no longer feel their own childhood fear does not recognise their child's either — and then the crying in the next room is not a signal, it is a reproach. Her treatment was not a course in parenting technique but a place where the mother could finally grieve her own childhood in someone's presence. When the feeling came back to the memory, behaviour towards the baby often changed without having been instructed at all.

   “In every nursery there are ghosts. They are the visitors from the unremembered past of the parents, the uninvited guests at the christening.”

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