ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the impact of perinatal depression on relationships in families and especially on couple relationships. It explains the Murray Leishman lends urgency to calls for routine screening and parenting support for perinatally depressed mothers. Insecure attachment to mothers during infancy, marital conflict and further maternal depression, extending beyond the perinatal period, were also correlated with offsprings’ experience of lifetime depression. One of the main imperatives, therefore, that parenthood demands is to clear the hurdles thrown up by oedipal conflict. Reflection in anticipation of parenthood allows both a reconnection with parents and the kind of separation that might allow a different dependency to evolve, so that there can be recognition and a further affirmation of the new parent as adult. In the short space of time between Richard and Jane’s heady romance and coming for couple therapy—barely three years—the outlook for the family appeared challenging.
