Treatment-via-the Parent: A Case of Bereavement

In this report I shall portray three crucial years of Steven's development, from the time of his father's death — just prior to Steven's third birthday — till the beginnings of latency at age six. I shall focus on tracing how aspects of the father's illness, death and the subsequent fatherless years affected Steven's development. He was helped by his mother with whom I worked throughout this period in a weekly treatment-via-the-parent and by the teaching staff of the Hanna Perkins Therapeutic Nursery School and Kindergarten where Steven had attended since he was three and a half years old (R.A. Furman and A. Katan, 1969). The therapeutic work was based on the mother's and teachers' observations, augmented by my own weekly visits at the school.

Although we kept open the option of individual analysis for Steven, during this period of work we considered treatment-via-the-parent to be the treatment of choice for several reasons: in spite of phase-appropriate difficulties, some neurotic manifestations, and a tendency to instinctual regression under stress, Steven maintained a progressive development. His defences had not calcified to the point of rigidity, nor had they been inadequate to binding his anxieties. Thus no serious inner obstacles interfered with access to his psychic life. The mother-child relationship was characterised by age-appropriate closeness and empathic mutual understanding as well as a shared knowledge of the past. Even at the height of distress at the beginning of our work, the mother functioned well in her parental role, was familiar with emotional development and its handling and keen on actively helping her boy. Aware of some of her weaknesses, she struggled valiantly to overcome them and largely succeeded. Apart from these more usual indications for treatment-via-the-parent, it seemed particularly important that, following the loss of the father, the mother-child relationship should not be interfered with by the introduction of an out