A woman came to a salon to have her nails done. She settled comfortably into the chair, parked her stroller next to her, and prepared for the procedure. At first, everything was calm: her baby slept peacefully, she sipped her coffee, and nothing foretold any disturbance.

Suddenly, the baby woke up, began to strain, his face turned crimson, and he burst into loud crying. In that instant, the entire salon seemed frozen: both staff and clients stopped for a moment, some turning to look at her. A tense silence fell, and it even seemed, to her, as if the music had stopped playing.

“What?” she shrugged. “Babies make all kinds of noises; they cry. Right now, he’s having colic—it hurts, so he cries.” But her words seemed to dissolve into the silence. Some people looked at her with pity and sympathy, others with reproach and irritation, still others with anxiety, as if to say, “Make that baby stop immediately!”

She picked her son up, but he kept crying and curling his legs—colic doesn’t pass in an instant. The atmosphere in the salon began to tighten, as if the sound of a crying baby were the most unbearable noise in the world.

And yet, if we think about it, an infant’s cry is entirely natural and, moreover, one of the very few ways they can communicate with the world. But it is also one of the most affectively charged stimuli for an adult and can provoke a spectrum of reactions—from empathy to irritation, helplessness, and even rage.

From a developmental point of view, a newborn’s cry is a signal of need or tension—pain, hunger, fear, anxiety. This signal is raw, unsymbolized, and, as Donald Winnicott (1949) noted, relentless. A mother’s—or any caregiver’s—capacity to “hold” this cry and respond to it forms the early matrix of trust and continuity of being in the child.

As Ogden (1986) has pointed out, the newborn’s world is first and foremost a bodily world. The infant projects all stimuli and proto-sensory experiences outward because they are unbearable to contain internally. Until they learn to process this experience themselves, to understand what is happening inside, they evacuate it—expecting someone else to do this psychic work for them.

Thus, the cry is the sensory manifestation of this “psychic evacuation.” I put “psychic” in quotation marks because what the infant expels is not yet fully psychic material. The mother becomes the object who must receive it, process it within her own psyche, and transform it into thinkable elements.

The foundation of the child’s capacity to think depends precisely on the mother’s ability to contain—receiving, metabolizing, and returning the infant’s experience in a more tolerable form. Thinking does not arise spontaneously; it develops in response to the need to deal with emotional experience.

In other words, when a mother notices her child’s distress, understands what they feel, and soothes them—through touch, voice, gaze—she processes their raw emotional experience, “digests” it, gives it meaning, and returns it in a safer, comprehensible form (“This is pain; it will pass. This is hunger; it can be satisfied”).

But in reality, no mother possesses an “omnipotent container”—always available, endlessly capable of withstanding everything without limit. Fatigue, her own anxiety, depression, internal conflicts, unresolved trauma—all can cause this already finite maternal container to falter.

There are also the mother’s own experiences. As Winnicott (1949) famously described in his paper Hate in the Counter-Transference, the infant who “cries all night” or refuses to settle tests the psychic boundaries of the mother. In response to the baby’s insatiable demands, feelings of hate naturally arise.

Winnicott listed reasons why a mother might hate her baby: for being entirely dependent; for “sucking her dry”; for demanding endlessly; for destroying her sleep; for intruding on her private life; for crying at the most inopportune moment; for being relentless. This list, radical though it may seem, remains relevant.

A psychologically mature mother can tolerate such feelings without retaliating, without breaking the bond with her child. But if her inner container is fragile, this hate may break through as avoidance, discharge, or action—aggression, withdrawal, psychosomatic reactions. The more fragile the container, the more persecutory the infant’s unmentalized cry becomes. As Meltzer (1968) wrote, uncontained projective identifications can even evoke disintegration anxiety in the mother.

Here lies the closed circle: every adult, as a baby, faced the collapse of the fantasy of an ideal mother—always available, endlessly enduring. Some part of that early experience was never recognized or processed by their own mother, who herself was once such a baby.

This explains why an adult finds it difficult to endure a baby’s cry. Esther Bick (1964), founder of the infant observation method, emphasized that an uncontained newborn cry can resonate with unconscious conflicts in the observer. Thomas Ogden (2005) wrote that the infant’s “interrupted cries” awaken primitive anxieties in the observer—the “crying baby within.”

This is the mechanism of identification. Affective resonance occurs when an adult hears a baby cry and their own earliest experiences of unmet needs, helplessness, or primitive terror come alive. If their own crying as a child was ignored, mocked, or violently silenced, they may never have developed an internal container to hold such states in another.

The baby’s cry becomes “unbearable” because it is not only the child’s—it is the reactivation of the adult’s own denied dependency and unmet need. In practice, the adult confronted with persistent crying must face feelings of inadequacy, guilt, or rage.

Parents often admit to feeling intense irritation or even impulses to silence the baby forcibly. Such impulses, if unacknowledged, can be dangerous. The task is not to eliminate hate but to tolerate it and transform it into care.

Margaret Rustin (2019) also noted that contemporary parenting culture places enormous pressure on mothers to be endlessly patient. Social taboos against acknowledging negative feelings toward a baby only intensify shame and isolation in parents who cannot bear the cry.

Some parents unconsciously reenact their own early deprivation by emotionally withdrawing or dissociating in the face of infant distress. Others project blame outward, interpreting the baby’s normal dependency as manipulation or attack.

Thus, the adult’s inability to endure a baby’s cry is not simply a matter of patience or temperament. It is a psychic echo of their own primitive, unprocessed experiences of helplessness and fear. Hatred of the cry does not make one a bad parent—it reveals how vulnerable their own inner baby remains, and how much depends on the parent’s capacity to contain, symbolize, and metabolize these primitive impulses.

Psychoanalytic work emphasizes the importance of exploring these unbearable feelings. This is a step toward creating a space for symbolization: asking, “Who or what inside me is crying when the baby cries?” Instead of unconsciously severing the bond or acting out aggression, the parent can begin to hold both the crying child and the crying child within.

References
Bick, E. (1964) Notes on Infant Observation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol.45, pp.558-66.
Meltzer D. (1968) Terror, Persecution, Dread. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol.49, pp.396-411.
Ogden T. H. (1986). The Matrix of The Mind: Object Relations and Psychoanalytic Dialogue. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson.
Ogden, T. H. (2005). This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries. London: Routledge.
Rustin M. (2019) Infant Observation and the Development of Psychoanalytic Thinking. Routledge.
Winnicott, D. W. (1949). Hate in the Counter-Transference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol.30, pp.69-74.