‘The impact of parental interventions’

Dear Sir,

I am responding to Geoffrey Baruch's ‘The impact of parental interventions on the analysis of a 5-year-old boy’, published in the October 1997 issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78:913-926.

Although in the past as well as now, some child analysts have viewed their patients' parents as potential enemies to be avoided, kept at bay or, at best, propitiated into shouldering the practical burdens of having a child in daily treatment, there have always been other child analysts who have been able to empathize with the parent-child relationship in which parents and child experience the introduction of the child analyst as an incisive upheaval and potential threat—the more so the younger the child. In order to assist parents and child in weathering this upheaval and finding mutually respectful and helpful ways of including the analyst and analysis in their lives, several forms of approaches have been studied and found to facilitate the overcoming of the inevitable hurdles.

With the help of empathic and appropriate work with the patients' parents, their wish and ability to support the full course of their children's analyses is mostly assured, as is their help to their children later, in integrating the gains of treatment and coping with the developmental tasks of new phases. By contrast, when we fail to consider the parents' feelings and necessary role in their children's analyses, treatments tend to get interrupted and/or gains do not become adeqately integrated. Such experiences are stressful for all.

It is sad to read about the suffering inflicted on a child analyst, his young patient and the patient's parents, all resulting from ignorance of the role of parents in all aspects of a child's life, including his analysis. And, even as this distressing experience prompts the analyst to become more aware of the parents' feelings and of needed changes in relating with and helping them, one is saddened to realize that such a baptism by fire was needed