ABSTRACT
Clinicians increasingly recognize that when parents and infants experience difficulties in the early years it is important to treat not only the parents’ difficulties and depression. The infant and the mother–infant relationship also need therapeutic input to ensure optimal outcomes. In infant–parent psychotherapy the clinician works, in the infant’s presence, with the parents’ anxiety or distorting projections. She is seen as present in her own right, and related to in an attempt to alter her representations. Women struggle to recognize that their vulnerability and openness to counter-transference experience represents a strength, similar to how mothers of infants are usually unaware of what a difficult task they are doing until it is validated. Michele Meehan, Maternal and Child Health Nurse, was consulted about an eleven-month-old boy who was furious that his mother wanted to wean him. His mother had been trying to introduce other food from six months of age but he had refused everything except breast milk.
