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Björn Salomonsson takes guesswork seriously; the sort of attentive, informed guesswork a parent in ordinary good-enough circumstances might use in deducing and attending to a baby's needs. This same quality of ‘creative alertness’ (p. 16), which Salomonsson attributes to primary maternal preoccupation, pervades his latest book:
a rich and comprehensive exposition on the value of early psychotherapeutic interventions for infants and parents. He simply ‘cannot stop thinking’, he tells us, ‘what goes on in a baby's mind’. His answer - on the face of it a simple guide to anyone working in the field of perinatal mental health - is ‘to observe the baby, ask the mother, and guess’ (p. 165).
The reality, of course, is more complex. Salomonsson is a medical doctor, psychiatrist and adult and child psychoanalyst based in Stockholm. He has built an international reputation on his clinical, theoretical and research work in psychodynamic therapy with infants and parents (PTIP) at Child Health Centres. His own ‘guesswork’ - including his ‘imaginative formulations of the baby's or the parent's representations’ (p. xi) - is more a restless quest for understanding based on solid clinical experience, rigorous theoretical questioning and careful appraisal of the research evidence. Consequently, a bit like a baby, Psychodynamic Interventions is both irresistible and demanding.
Drawing the reader in with vivid case material from psychotherapeutic work with mothers, fathers and babies, the book details the unique psychic and emotional dynamics of pregnancy, childbirth, infancy and toddlerhood, weaving clinical insights, psychoanalytic theory and empirical evidence into an integrated, conceptually challenging (and occasionally dizzying) whole. Salomonsson's demand of his readers -be they psychoanalysts or psychotherapists, clinical psychologists or social workers, healthcare workers, medics or research scientists - is that they too are willing to engage with creative alertness. He wants u