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The title of this Journal—Couple and Family Psychoanalysis—is the starting point for my report on the 2014 the World Association of Infant Mental Health (WAIMH) Congress, an international conference held in Edinburgh in the European summer of 2014. If we think about what changes a “couple” into a “family”, it is the arrival of a child. This is true for couples of any sexual orientation, be they straight, gay, or transsexual. It is the arrival of a child that is generally accepted as the event that forms a family, which includes those whose family is formed by surrogacy, adoption, fostering, or the more traditional methods of heterosexual couple conception and delivery. This Journal's title, itself implies that its Editorial Board and its readership are interested in psychoanalytic understanding of couplings, transitions, and the emotional mix of family life when children are involved.
WAIMH aims to promote knowledge about the emotional health of the world's youngest citizens, and as such focuses on the infant from all perspectives. Its congresses feature research, clinical, and scientific papers on the emotional life of the infant and the corresponding life period of parents and families. Infant mental health (IMH) is an emerging field of practice, bringing together diverse domains: infant-parent psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, child psychotherapists, child and family social workers, behavioural psychologists, and neonatologists. Clinicians in innumerable positions working with very young children (from birth to three years), as well as laboratory researchers, academics, and policy makers, were represented on the conference programme. Around 1,400 delegates attended, making it quite “a show of hands” for the world's infants.
John Bowlby, one of the pioneers of attachment theory, would have been proud to have seen how far his field has developed. When Bowlby trained both as a child psychiatrist and as a psychoanalyst, he eventually came to feel that psychoanalysis, a