Psychodynamic Interventions in Early Childhood Mental Health

Psychodynamic Interventions in Early Childhood Mental Health: IPP and CPP

Towards Parenting the Child in Front of You by Integrating What is Behind You

by

Ali Freedman

May 2011

Advanced Infant Preschool Mental Health

Dr. Lily Cosico-Berge

Psychodynamic Interventions in Early Childhood Mental Health: IPP and CPP

Towards Parenting the Child in Front of You by Integrating What is Behind You

Needless to say, psychodynamic interventions with the infant and preschool population do not involve putting the infant on a couch, allowing cathartic free expression, and offering the caricature-like “mmm” and “tell me more” passive encouragement of comic book psychoanalysis.

Infants, toddlers, and preschoolers develop in relationships. They do, of course, enter the world biologically predisposed and informed by the genetics of their parents. Add to that that the world into which they are born is a complex environmental and relational crock pot, if you will. The people with whom these infants relate as they grow and develop are not blank slates, nor are they perfectly attuned. They grow and develop in a transactional feedback loop and it is that relationship feedback loop that is the primary candidate for intervention, primarily through identification and interpretation of the caregiver’s “ghosts” and attributions and identification and interpretation of the child’s needs to support attunement and matching.

Infant Parent Psychotherapy was developed by Selma Fraiberg. She described how disturbances are manifestations of unresolved conflicts in the parent’s past relationships and how meanings are mutually constructed (Fraiberg, 1980). She famously referred to “ghosts in the nursery” where “ghosts of the parental past take possession of the nursery [specifically where] mothers reared their infants in a repetition of the pathological and traumatic parenting they had suffered as infants” (Fraiberg et al, 1975). This and related research examined...