Ghosts in the nursery: a psychoanalytic approach to the problems of impaired infant–mother relationships 1

In every nursery there are ghosts. They are the visitors from the unremembered past of the parents, the uninvited guests at the christening. Under favorable circumstances, these unfriendly and unbidden spirits are banished from the nursery and return to their subterranean dwelling place. Even among families where the love bonds are stable and strong, the intruders from the parental past may break through the magic circle in an unguarded moment, and a parent and his child may find themselves reenacting a moment or a scene from another time with another set of characters. In still other families there may be more troublesome events in the nursery caused by intruders from the past. There are, it appears, a number of transient ghosts who take up residence in the nursery on a selective basis. Ghosts who have established their residence privileges for three or more generations may not, in fact, be identified as representatives of the parental past.