Negri/Harris

The Story of Infant Development

Preface

by Gianna Polacco Williams

This precious book, based on verbatim transcriptions of supervision recordings, provides an opportunity for a valuable emotional and learning experience also for those who did not meet Martha Harris when she was alive. Romana Negri says in her introduction, quoting Martha Harris: `The emotion is the thing which gives the meaning, and the thought is a way of organizing that meaning and giving form to it.’ It is a great gift to recapture the feeling of the seminars held by Mattie (as all of us who worked with her used to call her). She had an inimitable style and she was one of the most facilitating persons I have ever met. One of her favourite quotations was a sentence she paraphrased from Bion, saying that we should worry not so much about our inhibitions as about our tendency to inhibit others.

A very large part of this book is based on the observation of one normal child, Simone, from birth to three years; another chapter which includes an enriching contribution from Donald Meltzer concerns a young child not affected by serious psychopathology; and there is also a chapter differentiating through observation between psychopathology and physical illness. Martha Harris was an exquisite clinician and supervisor of clinical work but she felt passionately that the study of normal development `against which psychopathological development can be measured’ was an essential foundation for the training of all in the helping professions as well as for future clinicians.

She wrote: `Change and expansion need to be facilitated so that psychoanalytical ideas can travel and take root amongst workers who are ready to receive them so that their usefulness may find homes in which to flourish.’ She gave an impulse to a project found by many very daring at the time, which transformed a small pre-clinical training into what was to become a course in Psychoanalytic Observational Studies open to all professionals interested in learning about normal development. The intention was that only a small proportion of them would opt to become clinicians; many others (nurses, teachers) used the opportunity to deepen and widen their approach to the work they were involved in. The first year Mattie accepted fourteen students for this course (there are now over 300) was called `the year of the bulge’. Mattie brushed aside criticism by saying: ` If you plant many flowers the weeds cannot grow.’ It was not meant to make gardening sense and Mattie knew it, as she was a keen and excellent gardener.

This book, where we can hear Mattie speak with her own voice - as so little in the text has been amended - is a marvellous opportunity for people who did not have the chance to meet her to get to know her; and it is an incredible privilege to re-establish contact with her 20 years after her death for those of us who found her and still find her a unique source of inspiration. I will conclude by paraphrasing something I have heard her say more than once: `The only way to develop resides in an intimate internal relationship with people, dead or alive, who have inspired us.’