Abstract
This essay was inspired by the experience of observing a newborn baby and the mother on a weekly basis for an entire year. I explore the receptive function of the maternal body whose mirroring acts created the intermediate area between her and her baby facilitating for what I call imitative playing. The concept of imitation came to mind because of its physicality. The reason for naming it ‘playing’ lies in its quality: I am trying to capture something about the perceptual and communicative capacity of the body. Born out of affective mutuality of the dyad, it is a corporeal elaboration of their union, the primary physical aliveness, that could be an observable element of personalization, a precursor in the journey to symbolism. The direct observation of infants is not sufficient to arrive at the ideas that I have suggested without psychoanalytic knowledge, the substance that I have imbued with what I perceived. In Winnicottian language this could be described as psychoanalytic apperception. I think it stems from an analyst’s visceral self that gives life to psycho-analytic concepts as well as transforms an analysand’s non-verbal expressions into communications.