Mother-Infant Work and Its Impact on Psychoanalysis With Adults

Bibliographic Data

ID6130138
AuthorsBjörn Salomonsson (0000-0003-4747-541X, Karolinska Institutet, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume32
Issue1
Pages3-13
Publication date2009-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0106-2301 • E-ISSN: 1600-0803
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01062301.2009.10592636
OpenAlexW2071916423
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited27

Experiences from mother-infant psychoanalytic treatments help us understand and handle adult psychoanalyses. Babies flood us with non-verbal expressions of their feeling states. Working with a mother who is soothing her baby, the analyst can observe container-contained interactions from another perspective than in a traditional analytic setting and gain a new understanding of how he himself interacts with his adult patient. The struggles that occur between babies and mothers visualize how they influence each other's inner worlds. Having witnessed such interactions contributes to making the analyst conversant in speaking with adult patients about himself as an external object. At times, this may imply disclosing how unconscious factors behind his interventions and attitudes have influenced the analysand. Work with a 2-week old boy and his mother and with a 35-year-old woman are presented as examples. The baby-mother work inspired the adult analysis, the quality of which gradually shifted from “battlefield” to “playground”, two metaphors borrowed from Freud

Developmental psychology · Epistemology · Feeling · Object (grammar) · Perspective (graphical) · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Reflexive pronoun · Unconscious mind · Child Therapy and Development · Counseling, Therapy, and Family Dynamics · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Social Psychology

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