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Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Beatrice Beebe called two colleagues—Phyllis Cohen and Anni Bergman—with thoughts about the many pregnant women and women with young children who had suddenly lost their husbands and fathers. These calls led to the formation of a team of eight therapists (supported by many behind-the-scenes volunteers) who banded together to create an intervention project designed to help mothers mourn, bond with their infants and minimize transmission of trauma. This book, originally published as a special issue of Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, is both a description of a long-term multimodal treatment program for traumatized mothers and children and a moving story of loss, grief, trauma and repair.
The story of the project unfolds through a series of interrelated chapters describing the support groups and video feedback consultations that became the primary clinical interventions; additional chapters present theory and research informing the clinical approach, the therapists' process and collaboration, and excellent literature reviews on early trauma. Like a dramatic chorus, the project's themes are repeated again and again: Therapists hold mothers, so that they might hold their babies. Therapists help mothers help their children mourn fathers they never knew. Therapists support each other, so that they can think and work in the face of unspeakable grief.
In her discussion of therapists working in NYC directly following September 11, 2001 Seely (2008) observed that the mental health field was not adequately prepared to treat trauma in the aftermath of terrorism. Although most believed that untreated adult onset trauma could result in transmission of symptoms from parent to child, “… there was little definitive evidence either supporting or refuting the effectiveness of specific psychological interventions …” (p. 33). Beebe and her colleagues were able to build upon many years studying mother-infant communic