No moment in human life is more mysterious nor more profound than that of the newborn infant. How strange that even though we have all been there it is as remote as the dark side of the moon.

Psychoanalysts tend to direct a great deal of imagination towards this moment, as the cosmologist imagines the dawn of time. One common theme I’ve noticed among these many accounts is that of space, whether that is the boundless space of oceanic feeling, where the infant’s self includes everything; or the bounded void-space of Lacan’s fine concept The Thing, in which preverbal experience is conceived as a kind of hermetically-sealed vessel from which proceeds the entire mythological universe; or Esther Bick’s descriptions of the new born infant, feeling as if they had been shot from their space ship (the womb) into empty space and so may be consumed with terrors of spilling out, or of falling forever.

Say what you will about the term depth psychology its operative metaphor implies that the psyche is a chasm. The scaffolds of the symbolic reach down as far as you are willing to climb into endless space. How vertiginous it is to realize that this chasm is not only inside of you, but outside as well, and that occasionally snaps to actual chasms—misty mountain chasms, sea chasms, and finally the chasm of the universe.

And no wonder the infant is terrified of falling forever! The infant’s environment, in this moment of becoming, has no discernable limits. I’ve met certain schizophrenics with a holy terror of the floor falling out from under them; a totally irrational fear of falling into the ground (that I have also experienced on occasion). It is precisely this fear of falling that Esther Bick has likewise noted in her patients and that she then reads retroactively into the primordial psyche of the newborn. The infant and the schizophrenic are on to something: solid ground is contingent and precarious and can vanish in an instant.

If we imagine the ego as a kind of leaky container (some egos are more leaky than others) by which one projects necessary limits onto the universe—the ground itself—and if the infant, in a very literal sense, has no ego, nor any notion of “ground,” then the greater part of infantile helplessness is being suspended in an abyss. It is as if the infant had been born into sunyata, that formless emptiness that the Mahayana Buddhist attempts to recover in their m. That this emptiness happens to be the nursery matters little to the infant, for whom, like a quantum particle, all limits are functionally non-existent. The infant has no conception of walls, floors, or ceilings, nor any inside/outside.

Here we can see how the ancient practice of swaddling provides the infant with a tightly confined limit by contiguous pressure and the constriction of movement; in that moment, those swaddling bands are the child’s functional ego—an auxiliary womb. For it is mother finally who, painstakingly and with a great deal of love and affection, puts the ground under baby—and so no wonder that we so often call the earth mother; Pachamama, as they say in the Amazon rain-forest, our little patch of earth, falling through the cosmos.