ABSTRACT
Infant–parent psychotherapy was first named and developed by an American child psychoanalyst, Selma Fraiberg. Infant–parent psychotherapy was the treatment of choice whenever the baby had come to represent an aspect of the parental self which was repudiated or negated, or when the baby had become the representation of figures. The clarity with which Fraiberg formulated the essentials of infant–parent psychotherapy offered the author security when she makes her first tentative move from working exclusively with individual children and parents to working with mother–infant couples and young families. As Daniel Stern has said, infant–parent psychotherapy is not a behaviour-orientated therapy, but a representation-oriented one. When trying to understand the many baffling problems that arise in infant–parent relationships, the author find it helpful to work with T. Benedek’s hypothesis that the experience of becoming a parent evokes representations of the parent’s own early infant–parent relationship.
