Cradle Cap

It begins with a layer. Yellow-brown, greasy, firm — like a crust settling over your baby's soft scalp. Medically it's called seborrheic dermatitis: an overproduction of the sebaceous glands, a harmless skin condition that resolves on its own. But the mother who sees these flakes for the first time often feels something other than harmlessness. She feels worry. Uncertainty. And sometimes — without being able to name it — a feeling that reaches deeper than the surface of the scalp.

The psychosomatic perspective asks not only why the skin produces flakes. It asks: what is being expressed here — in a being that has no words yet, but a body that already speaks? And it asks something more uncomfortable: what is this child mirroring that it cannot have from its own field — because it barely has a field of its own yet?