ABSTRACT
Parent-infant psychotherapy creates a new relational system that works with the impact of trauma in the crucible of the parent-infant relationship, transforming the baby’s intersubjective experience. This chapter portrays a baby’s experience of a relational process that arose in parent-infant psychotherapy in the Parent-Infant Project at The Anna Freud Centre, London. The therapy was constructed between the baby, her mother and myself as therapist. The mother, Anna, in her twenties, and her first child – four-month old Nadia – were referred because of worry about their lack of smiling and of mutuality. I was the fifth professional to join their professional network. Later in the chapter I offer a detailed account of my work with Anna and Nadia. But first I offer a summary of some major theoretical ideas that informed my approach.
When I first met Anna, she told me that she and her daughter ‘were needing/ wanting support for both of us in our relationship after really hard times’. I felt there was hope in this expression of need, for Anna was herself naming the relationship as in difficulty, in a context of traumatizing external and internal factors – political, historical, cultural, biological, and psychological. In asking for help with ‘our’ relationship Anna unknowingly highlighted a feature in this form of therapeutic work. Neither mother nor infant is viewed as the patient. The ‘patient’ is the relationship that exists between them. Infant and parent are viewed as a system. Winnicott (1957, 1965) was one of the first to view ‘mother-infant’ as a system – there is no such thing as a baby, only a mother and baby. His work prefigured that of future dynamic systems theorists (initially, Sander, 1962), whose work has current impact on psychoanalytic therapies, especially parent-infant psychotherapy (Schore, 1994; Tronick, 1989; Stolorow, 1997; Stern et al., 1998; Beebe & Lachmann, 2002).
