Psychoanalytic Therapy with Infants and their Parents Practice, Theory, and Results

Psychoanalytic Therapy with Infants and Parents provides a clear guide to clinical psychoanalytic work with distressed babies and unhappy parents, a numerous clinical group so often in need of urgent help. Although psychoanalytic work is primarily verbal, and infants may have limited language, this form of treatment is receiving increased attention among therapists. Björn Salomonsson explores how such work can be possible and benefit infants, how to work with the parents (especially the mother), and how major psychoanalytic concepts such as primal repression, infantile sexuality and transference can be worked with and understood in these therapies.

Björn Salomonsson argues that attachment concepts, though important, cannot solely help explain everyday problems with breastfeeding, sleeping, and weaning, or more recalcitrant interaction disorders. He shows how we also need psychoanalytic concepts to better understand, not only such "baby worries", but also adult clients' non-verbal communications and interactions. Throughout, he uses extensive practice-based examples and also refers to his research which provides evidence for the effectiveness of this practice.

Psychoanalytic Therapy with Infants and Parents provides a unique perspective on working psychoanalytically with parents and infants. This book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and therapists working with children as well as adults.

Introduction. Primal Representations – Three-Month-Old Tina. Containment –Maternal Music and Paternal Worlds With Three-Month-Old Frida. What Does a Baby Understand? – Eight-Month-Old Karen. An Infant’s Experience of Mother’s Depression – Sixteen-Month-Old Beate. The Infant "Within " the Adult – Interacting With Monica. The Living Fossil – Tristan’s Urvergessen. Classical Concepts Revisited I – Primal Repression. Classical Concepts Revisited II – Infantile Sexuality. Classical Concepts Revisited III – Transference. Mother-Infant Psychoanalytic Treatment – Does it Work? Epilogue.

Björn Salomonsson is a training and child psychoanalyst of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Association, a psychoanalyst in private practice and a consultant psychoanalyst at the Mama Mia Child Health Centre, both in Stockholm. He is also a researcher at the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health at the Karolinska Instituet, Stockholm.

Front cover © photo and sculpture "Home", Henrietta Shapira