ABSTRACT
Three recurring themes in clinical discussions of work with fathers in psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy are the question of transference and countertransference, the types of intervention used in the therapy, and triadic work and its relation to the triadic capacities of the therapist. Salomonsson asks whether such specific father transference phenomena exist at all. If so, what might be their various manifestations and how should we handle them? He begins by briefly defining the transference concept and proceeds to discussing these questions with clinical samples from the book and his own practice. His conclusion is that one may speak of a father’s transference but not the generalising term of ‘father transference’. Baradon looks at broad groupings of intervention in psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy work with fathers: those that address intrapsychic factors that impact the father’s capacity to assume his role, those that attend to mother’s to maternal conflicts that compromise the father and his fathering, those that work therapeutically with the baby in his plight of ‘fatherlessness’ or frightening fathering, interventions to reduce parental conflict and to promote maternal and paternal functioning within the triad.
