Brief but deep: psychoanalytic consultations at a Child Health Centre

Journal title INTERAZIONI
Author/s Bjorn Salomonsson
Publishing Year 2015 Issue 2015/1
Language Italian Pages 9 P. 11-19 File size 41 KB
DOI 10.3280/INT2015-001002
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Psychotherapeutic consultations with infants and parents can focus on promoting attachment, facilitating development, and improving interactions. Some techniques provide guidance to the parents, whereas others interpret their unconscious fantasies or "ghosts" contributing to the child’s disorder. Techniques also exist that emphasize the therapist’s interaction with the child in the presence of the parent(s). Such techniques address both mother and child about their unconscious motivations and feelings towards the therapist - provided the therapist recalls that though the baby’s involvement in treatment may be intense, his linguistic comprehension is limited. A therapist working in general health care consultations needs to adapt to constraints posed by time, budget, and the parents’ motivation. Yet, in such brief interventions s/he can utilize experiences from lengthier treatments, and knowledge of psychoanalytic theory, to better understand the suffering of mother and child and how best to help them. This will be illustrated with a case of a mother and a two-and-a-half-month-old boy. She got a tumour during pregnancy and was operated, including a Caesarean section. Medically, everything went well but her relationship with the boy was clearly affected. A treatment of eight sessions succeeded in loosening up many obstructions to their love relationship.

Keywords: Parent-infant psychotherapy, attachment, pregnancy, interpretation, parent-infant interaction

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    DOI: 10.3280/INT2023-001005

Bjorn Salomonsson, Brevi ma profonde. Consultazioni psicoanalitiche nel Centro Pediatrico Mama Mia in "INTERAZIONI" 1/2015, pp 11-19, DOI: 10.3280/INT2015-001002