Humanizing the impostor: object relations and illness equations in the neonatal intensive care unit.

In this paper I explore a seemingly mundane and inconsequential act--that of placing dolls and stuffed animals into newborns' incubator machines, in what I dub a kind of "teddy bear diplomacy," whereby mothers ornament their babies' high tech life-support prostheses with commonplace toys and trinkets. Using hospital ethnography and maternal interviews, I probe the psychodynamic significations of these ornamenting acts, which aspire to domesticate, animate and even humanize the incubator, itself a cyborg womb that displaces maternal purpose and problematizes bonding. The stress triggered by a high-risk infant and the double bind imposed by the therapeutic protocol lead me to here examine the intersubjectivity of illness in mothers' comorbidity and satellite syndromes. I argue that teddy bears and like artifacts serve as countertransitional objects to materially symbolize and perform the imagined mother-child dyad. Moreover, as autopoetic devices in the metamorphosis of maternal identity, they may empower a mother's vicarious participation in her child's healing, and thereby work towards closure of her own intersubjective afflictions.