ABSTRACT
The work at The Family House is more driven by object relations theory, empathic accessibility, corrected attachment experiences and improving the parents’ self-esteem. Psychotherapy with parents and infants, as it is practiced at The Family House, is quite similar to the work that Daniel N. Stern describes with the clients of the San Francisco group. The therapeutic work at The Family House is based on the post-Freudian model of psychoanalysis—a model that is appropriate for the treatment of people with personality disorders and affective disorders, among others. The therapy that is used to effect change in the families deviates from previous psychotherapy approaches, which were more firmly anchored in Freudian thinking and its emphasis on interpretation and on making the unconscious conscious. The therapist gives the parents a written version of the therapy message to enable them to repeat the words to the child.
