The family system is not intrinsically benign. Dysfunction is, given the nature of man, inherent in its structure. It is endowed with enormous power to facilitate but also stunt and sometimes destroy the forward trajectory of a child’s life. In the belly of the family is a child psychiatrist’s diagnostic and therapeutic overlook. (12 pp.)

During pregnancy the self, in its attempts to incorporate a new and unfamiliar other, exhibits bizarre appetites, primitive fears, morbid preoccupations and volcanic eruptions. There is merit in the ancient Greek notion that hysteria results when an unquiet uterus looses its moorings and wanders aimlessly about the pelvic cavity in a peripatetic search for home. It is no wonder that pregnancy’s darker sides speak the language of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Joyce’s Ulysses and keen with the mournful, otherworldly echoes of the whale.

(13 pp.)