Jessica: The autobiography of an infant by Jeffrey Von Glahn

Jessica had always been haunted by the fear that the unthinkable had happened when she had been “made-up.” She had no sense of a Self. According to her mother, she was the perfect infant. She never seemed to want or to need anything. As a child, just thinking of saying “I need” or “I want” left her feeling like an empty shell and that her mind was about to spin out of control. Terrified of who––or what––she was, she lived in constant dread over being found guilty of impersonating a human being.

Jeffrey Von Glahn, Ph.D., a very experienced therapist with an unshakable belief in the intrinsic healing powers of the human spirit, and Jessica, his courageous client, blaze a trail into this unexplored territory. As if she has, in fact, become an infant again, Jessica remembers in extraordinary detail events from the earliest days of her life––events that threatened to twist her embryonic humanness from its natural course of development. Her recollections as an adult are like listening to an infant who could talk describe every psychologically dramatic moment of its life as it was happening.

For many months, Jessica’s therapy was stuck in an impasse. Dr. Von Glahn had absolutely no idea she was so terrified of talking about herself. In hopes of a breakthrough, she boldly asked for four hours of therapy a day, for three days a week, for three weeks. The mystery that was Jessica quickly cracked open in dramatic fashion. Then she asked for four days a week. In the following months, her electrifying journey into her mystifying past brought her ever closer to a final confrontation with the events that had threatened to forever strip her of her basic humanness.

Written in a very engaging style for the general reader from the late teen years and up, this absolutely true series of events opens a fascinating "window" into the everyday emotional life of an infant - and from the infant's point of view! The reader will discover that an infant's mind, even though not as developed as our own, is far more curious about the world, and especially the people in it - and, unfortunately, they're more sensitive to it. A major discovery was that if an infant can bring a smile to someone's face it is the highlight of her day!