01/05/2026
In the🌿newest eddition of the EFPP E-journal
In their thought-provoking article, 👉“Between Infant Observation and Psychotherapy,” 📌Fiorella Monti and 📌Barbara Giorgi explore the profound connections between early developmental experiences and the analytic process.
Drawing on psychoanalytic traditions shaped by figures like Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and Thomas Ogden, the authors show how 👶infant observation offers a unique window into the earliest forms of thought, bodily expression, and emotional communication—often the only accessible language for some adult patients.
🔹 Infant observation allows us to encounter the “primitive edge of experience”
🔹 Psychotherapy helps reconstruct narrative truth through words and meanings
🔹 Both processes reveal the deep, often unconscious, structures shaping human relationships
The article beautifully illustrates how 👉rhythm, 👉synchrony, and 👉emotional attunement—first experienced in the mother–infant dyad—resurface in the therapeutic relationship. The therapist, much like the attentive observer, becomes a container for anxieties and a guide in developing the patient’s capacity for self-observation.
From vivid clinical vignettes to theoretical reflections, this work invites us to think beyond words—into the sensory, emotional, and relational foundations of the mind.
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photo by: Hannah Barata on Pexels
