ABSTRACT
Parents’ insight, a new perspective and more complex way to understand their childhood memories and the underlying meanings of their own and their children’s behavior, is a transformative ingredient of the magic between parents and young children. Intense feelings activate ghosts, trigger repetitions of the past, and initiate the self-reflection process that leads to new meanings. Vignettes illustrate the ways in which parents’ insight helps to resolve typical parent-child relationship difficulties and developmental problems during the first 3 years of their children’s lives. Examples that capture dramatic moments of parents’ insight include a mother’s identification of the sexual meaning of a fanciful image in a recurrent childhood memory; the emergence of new meanings related to breastfeeding that help to resolve a mother’s conflicts about weaning or continuing to nurse her 17-month-old son; the connections that are identified between a mother’s emerging fear that her 3-year-old daughter will be sexually abused, her childhood memories about bathroom peeping, and the memory of an inappropriate kiss; and a story about a mother’s complete denial of her child’s inner world and the process of her discoveries. The power of insight is demonstrated.
