ABSTRACT
By describing infant–parent work with infants showing early signs of autism, Barbara Kalmanson explores the crucial issue of how infants and parents can be helped to make meaning with each other through verbal and nonverbal exchanges. The focus here is on therapeutic interactions that allow a co-construction of experience to unfold from interpersonally arrived-upon patterns of shared experience and mutual regulation. Linking intervention with research findings, Kalmanson focuses on the use of dynamic experience and developmental guidance to help parents understand their infant’s unique sensory, motor, and affective profile and its effects on parental experiences of caregiving. Small vignettes from treatment sessions and a case example serve to illustrate how the therapist attends to obstacles to sensorimotor organization and interactive synchrony while simultaneously considering the ghosts in the parents’ histories that may constrict parenting. This chapter also grapples with the work of the therapist in holding the family, timing interventions, finding ports of entry, and interpreting the infant’s functioning while addressing the parents’ internal worlds.
