Books - In Search of the Lost Mother of Infancy

Gives Comprehension to Incomprehensible Interactions Between Patients and Therapists
"Applying concepts of the organizing experience in a therapeutic setting, Hedges guides through the difficulties of learning how to identify and interpret encounters with the most primitive mental states of both patient and therapist. . . . He uses metaphors to convert to the infantile, preverbal core of personality functioning. He also shows the reader how to locate, identify, and connect with the contact moment as it appears and reappears in the analytic interaction. . . . The verbatim transcripts of cases that trouble experienced therapists give insight into the deepest core of personality issues. These are the cases that generate intense countertransference reactions, motivating therapists to seek consultation. The material is fascinating and refreshing, touching the depths of the human soul. His writing gives comprehension to incomprehensible interactions between patients and therapists."
—Marion F. Solomon

Transverses the Elusive Terrain of Early Longings Lodged in Us All
"Through case examples, this book illuminates the elusive and shadowed terrain of primitive strivings for the lost connection with mother at the earliest developmental level and how this searching is manifested in life and in the consulting room. It provides the professional with guidelines to identify how the terror of human contact and relating is at the root of the organizing (psychotic) level and the pockets of disorganized material that may be present, under stress, in highly functioning persons. It introduces the fact that the fight, flight, or freezing reactions to early contact dysfunctions with the primary caretaker register somatically and that in treatment they need to be met at this pre-verbal level. Hedges discusses how these organizing responses appear in the relationship with the therapist. Every conscientious, empathic, clinician can relate to the experience of working to connect with someone who at the very moment of conjunction seems to disappear.

"The author provides a window to understanding and managing conditions that have historically eluded treatment. The case examples illustrate how to track the moments of connection and disconnection that occur in the therapeutic relationship. The primary therapeutic focus is eventually to engage the client in monitoring these moments of contact and rupture. Attention is paid more to the structure of the therapeutic relationship than to the literal content of what the patient says.

"countertransference feelings and sensations stirred in the listener serve as cues to the client's efforts for contact and its inevitable rupture. However, these are not interpreted. With such patients the therapist needs to tolerate experiencing some of his or her own organizing material. The case studies bring alive the struggles in working with the organizing, presymbiotic experience. In a refreshing fashion, the emphasis is placed on the strivings for human connectedness rather than on pathology and the primitive, puzzling, blocks to interpersonal relatedness."
—William E. White