What Is the Container/Contained When There Are Ghosts in the Nursery
Joining Bion and Fraiberg in Dyadic Interventions With Mother and Infant
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11277458 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Johanna C Malone (Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, corresponding author), Carolyn J Dayton (0000-0003-3837-2355, Wayne State University) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 262-274 |
| Publication date | 2015-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Infant Mental Health Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-9641 • E-ISSN: 1097-0355 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/imhj.21509 |
| PMID | 25931380 |
| OpenAlex | W1583998666 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 32 |
“Ghosts in the nursery.” “Visitors from the unremembered past.” Fraiberg, Adelson, and Shapiro's (1975) words convey the relational “intruders” that they perceived while working with mothers and infants. A mother's unresolved past is a driving force within the treatment of mother–infant dyads. Working with these families, the therapist strives to process and metabolize the distress of the dyad while enabling the mother to contain the infant more fully. This article proposes that Fraiberg et al.’s metaphor may be newly elaborated utilizing Bion's (1962) original theoretical conceptualization of the “container and contained.” He posited that an infant projects distressing affective states upon the mother, who contains the experience, transforms the feelings, and then enables the infant to reintroject a more tolerable experience. This lays the foundation for the relational experience of being known by another and facilitates the infant's development of self‐knowledge and emotional regulation. We utilize Fraiberg et al.’s original case material to identify ways in which ghosts in the nursery disrupt the processes of the container and contained. Bion's ideas may help enrich our understanding of how the therapeutic relationship enables cycles of containment, transitioning the material “ghosts” from being contained by the infant to being contained by the therapist, and to ultimately being transformed so that the mother can reattribute them to the past
Conceptualization · Developmental psychology · Distress · Dyad · Feeling · Metaphor · Psychotherapist · Child Therapy and Development · Computer Science · Counseling, Therapy, and Family Dynamics · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Social Psychology
The Circle of Security project
The two‐person unconscious
Object Relations, Dependency, and Attachment
The origins of 12-month attachment
Ghosts in the Nursery
The disturbed caregiving system
Disorganized infant attachment strategies and helpless‐fearful profiles of parenting
Early stress and social support influences on mothers' and high-risk infants' functioning in late infancy
The clinical relevance of infancy
Understanding the “ghosts in the nursery” of pregnant women experiencing domestic violence
The impact of domestic violence on mothers' prenatal representations of their infants
The child as held in the mind of the mother
Implicit relational knowing
Foster mother state of mind and treatment use
On not being able to dream
Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious
On holding and containing, being and dreaming
Taking the Transference’
Playing With Reality
Interpretation and Containment
Measuring the Ghost In the Nursery
Dissociation and the Parent-Infant Dialogue
Angels in the nursery
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2025 (8) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |