Review by Booklist Review
French psychoanalyst Szejer subscribes to the current scientific conviction that newborns can feel, taste, smell, and even see, albeit to a temporarily limited capacity, and hear. In her maternity ward practice, she routinely relies upon yet more from newborns: that as well as simply hearing her speak to them, they can understand and respond. Moreover, in this fascinating account of her experiences during a 20-year career, she reports often dramatic psychoanalytic cures of conditions in infants that had been resistant to pharmaceutical intervention. She demonstrates how much can be accomplished by applying standard psychoanalytic principles to the treatment of babies who display a wide variety of symptoms, from colic to anorexia, but she emphasizes the importance of scrupulously obeying the rules of psychoanalysis banning uninvited intervention. She always involves a child's parents in treatment, and besides newborns, she works with mothers afflicted with baby blues. Parents as well as child-care professionals stand to discover something, perhaps many things, of value from this perceptive and compassionate book. --Donna Chavez Copyright 2004 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Review by Library Journal Review
Psychoanalysis may be a flawed theory, but as practiced by child psychiatrist Szejer in Paris, it can have remarkable effects on a newborn. Just as she would with an adult client, Szejer heals suffering newborns by talking with them and listening to them. Some of her interpretations require suspension of disbelief: she claims that babies respond not just to the sound of the right voice but to the words and that messages are recorded and responded to bodily in preverbal infants. Even if critics are correct in asserting that reading the telephone book aloud would have the same effect, Szejer's interventions over the past 11 years have humanized the birthing environment. Szejer combines passion with cool confidence and respect for nascent families to achieve astonishing results in failure-to-thrive infants. She supports her thesis with findings from neurology and linguistics, creating a developmental theory of body-mind integration that cannot be easily dismissed, despite some overconfident psychoanalytic formulations and attribution of meaning to events in utero. These are not controlled experiments, and Szejer influences the parenting process perhaps more than she does the babies, but she presents a challenging and important thesis. Relevant to readers in psychology, neonatology, adoption services, family therapy, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, this book could stir demand among lay readers, too. Recommended for diverse special and larger general collections.-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
