ABSTRACT
This chapter returns again to the theme elaborated in chapter 5: the intrusion into the child of the caregiver’s own traumatic experience. Ruth Safier discusses parent-infant therapy with a particular focus on those mothers who are at the extreme end of the containment spectrum—that is, those who project their own anxieties into their babies. She illustrates how these infants are swamped with the mother’s problems while their own primary anxieties are not touched. She also relates some of the very painful insights arising from this work to psychoanalytic technique.
