ABSTRACT
It is well known that treating children often means treating parents. This empirical finding, made by many clinicians has brought about original forms of treatments: family or systemic therapies and parent/child treatments, among which the best known are M. Mahler's tripartite treatment and S. Fraiberg's mother/infant therapies. Several therapists have refined parent/infant therapies, each bringing his or her contributions. This chapter provides the psychodynamic understanding of parent-infant conflicts and parenting failures. It describes these parental difficulties and, especially, technical ways of handling them in conjoint psychotherapies. The chapter also provides some research data on the modes of interactions between therapists and patients in mother/infant psychotherapies. Most psychoanalytically trained therapists expect to be very parsimonious in speech production. It is the undisturbed flow of associations—by the patient—that should predominate, leading the therapist to speak when an intervention or interpretation is safely anchored in the material and can be pronounced with profit.
