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Earl y Human Development, 30 (1992) 261-262Elsevier Scientific
Publishers Ireland Ltd.
261
EHD 01344
Book Review
From Fetus to Child - An O bservational and Psychoanalytic
StudyNew Library of Psychoanalysis No. 15Alessandra
PiontelliTavistocWRoutledge, London/NY, 1992.
Modern imaging and recording technology has given psychoanalysis
an oppor-tunity to transform itself from the hermetic discipline w
hich it has become into thescience which its founder Freud believed
that it should be. W ith its emphasis on theinfluence of early
experience on character formation, it will then be in the
footstepsof vegetative physiology which Professor David B arker has
shown to undergo per-manent modifications in relation to
vicissitudes around the time of birth.
Dr Piontellis book falls into two rather distinct parts, the
first dealing with theobservation of fetal and infant be haviour,
the second describin g a num ber of childanalyses in which the
material, when collated w ith information about pregnancy andbirth,
ap pears to sugge st that events before and at birth influence the
Weltanschaungof the developing child. A tenuous link between the
two parts is provided by the caseof a child who was both under
observation as a fetus and infant a nd later underwentanalysis as a
toddler.
For those interested in child developmen t, the first part of
the book is necessarilythe more illum inating; providing a kind of
natura l history out of whic h on reflectiontestable hypotheses may
be born. Using ultrasonographic films in the manner ofPrechtl, Dr
Piontelli was able to observe w hat to her seemed a remarkable
continuityin the general comp ortment of a baby before a nd after
birth, active babies remainingactive, sluggish babies sluggish - a
continuity well illustrated by the contrasting ac-tivity of the
several pairs of twins whom she was able to study. It was perhaps
unfor-tunate that she was unable for practical and ethical reasons
to have the two phasesof developm ent - before and after birth -
observed independ ently; but wh at shethus lost in objectivity she
gained in access as a trusted friend of the families con-cerned and
there is much to be said for completing diachronic studies before
attemp-ting to make sense of cross-sectional data in the manner of
Rutter. Her materialincidentally casts doubt on the real value of
studies of twin s separated at birth inresolving the question w
hether nature or nurture exerts the predominant influenceon human
behaviour since - albeit of her twins only one pair was identical -
itseemed as if the lower birth weight twin is usually the more
active and that twinstend to undergo quite different vicissitude s
before and during b irth as well asafterwards.
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From Fetus to Child is not a long book - some two-hundred fifty
pages in all -includin g preface, introduction, a tentative s
tateme nt of conclusio ns, an adequ ateindex and a fairly
comprehensive bibliography. The authors introduction makes itclear
that she is well aware of the limitations imposed by her training
and the cir-cumstances in which her studies were conducted on the
validity of her findings, b utthey represent a brave attempt to
explore what the French charmingly call la vieclandestine in the
wom b and they raise important questions which, in time, onehopes
that she or others following in her footsteps will be able to
answer. Her bookis recomm ended to everyone interested in early hum
an de velopmen t in the unex-plored area between the mythologies of
psychoanalysis and the mechanistic certain-ties of physiology -
leaving to one side pseudo-scien ce based on the activities
ofmaze-running rats, tethered dogs, computers or on crude
statistics. It is worthreading if only for the beautifully draw n v
ignettes of the families into which theauthors subjects were
born.
John A. Davis
