ABSTRACT
The parents representations have played a key role in the history of parent-infant psychotherapies influenced by psychodynamic considerations. The parents' representations of the baby and of themselves-as-parents may be given the highest priority in the mind and practice of the therapist, or they may be more or less ignored. This chapter describes these representations in terms of schemas-of-being-with. The conviction that the mother's representations can influence how she acts with her infant is as old as folk psychology. Many of the representations that the mother may evolve about the baby imply a complementary representation about her husband. When the father occupies a more traditional role, there are a host of representations of him that may assume clinical relevance. The father's representational world is largely parallel to the maternal representational world. Representations of the family of origin also play a major role in influencing how each new parent acts as a member of the new nuclear triad.
