"Let-Downs, Leaky Containers, and Elder Healing.” The NICU Experience from a Grandmother’s Perspective and Grandmotherly Transference in Therapy and Infant Observation

This article examines my experience of grandmotherhood and my daughter Anna’s autoethnography of her first moments of becoming a mother. Here, I reflect on the birth of my three grandchildren (for whom I use pseudonyms) in a recorded conversation with Anna. I am an emotional container for her which I contrast with the leaky container of the hospital as her babies required neonatal intensive care, and Anna was sent home without them. Our identities shift in relation to one another at her first son Rowan’s birth in a motherhood constellation. I propose that therapeutic positive autoethnography (THE PosAE) can support women as they navigate new life transitions through self-reflective exercises such as this one, or telling their stories and hearing other women’s stories, including their therapists experience of their client’s stories. I also explore the role of the observer in infant observation and the therapist as a benevolent grandmother figure who uses grandmaternal transference to create therapeutic possibilities embedded in intergenerational relationships. I conclude that grandmother’s matter, elders can transmit knowledge and healing to younger generations and therapists can integrate therapeutic positive autoethnography (THE PosAE) within clinical practice.