You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This paper will describe different psychotherapeutic interventions in cases of impaired mother/infant relationships. The idea arose from the following:
There is a group of children who, from birth, are reported to have difficulty thriving, bonding, coping with anxiety or tolerating frustrations. The mother's attitude often contributes to this problem. The result is emotional disturbance, expressed as screaming continuously for no apparent reason, breath-holding, feeding difficulties, vomiting where no cause can be found, etc.
There is a common pattern in children referred for psychotherapy, special education, fostering, institutionalisation or non-accidental injury. From a very early stage of their development, these children have shown symptoms that have been confirmed by the professionals working with them. These symptoms could vary from sleeping difficulties, withdrawal, hyperactivity, proneness to accidents, etc.
The main objectives are: to explore a variety of impaired mother/infant relationships in the hope that this will contribute to the basis for further exploration of technical and theoretical issues in this area; and to offer a framework for intervention at the earliest possible stage.
Drs Johnson, Dowling and Wesner mounted a maternal/infant programme at the Milwaukee Health Centre where the distressed infant was encouraged to take the lead and the mother was asked to follow its behaviour as unobtrusively as possible, for an hour a week. Johnson et al used the mother as therapist and mother/baby interaction was supervised with the aid of a video. The psychotherapist was directed to sensory-motor patterns of response. Unfortunately the investigators did not believe that psychic awareness could be functioning at this age, so subtle symbolic interactions were not examined. Other workers have most frequently treated the distressed infant by working with the mother. Contributions in this area include the work of Brazelton et al (1971) and .