No Lasting Fruit at All': Containing, Recognition, And Relinquishing in the Girl Who Married the Reindeer‪.‬

Psychoanalytic development theory has consistently explored various metaphors--containment, holding, recognition, affect attunement--for the maternal activity that is necessary to form the somatic sense of self and to perceive and think about the me and not-me environment; in other words, to become one's own container, able to own affects rather than be overwhelmed by them. The mother acts as an outside other ... The first form she assumes is that of concrete physical other, whose holding and breathing contain the child ... (1) ... To the grace of a future that none can control. (2)