Infant-Parent Psychotherapy

Infant-parent psychotherapy has developed to meet the needs of families in which the referred patient is an infant or toddler. It is a form of therapy which will appeal to an increasing number of child psychotherapists who find themselves expanding their work with parents and family groups. Currently the method enjoys the support of WAIPAD (the World Association for Infant Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines) and so has international appeal. Much of its psychodynamic approach is already familiar to members of our profession, who may discover that they have unknowingly been doing it already. However, a particular advantage of this therapy lies in the simplicity and clarity with which its essential principles have been formulated. This advantage both facilitates our communication with other professions and our participation in an international development.

Infant-parent psychotherapy was first described and named by Selma Fraiberg ten years ago in her brilliant book Clinical Studies in Infant Mental Health (1980). Since then significant clinical and theoretical contributions to the subject have been made by Bertrand Cramer and Daniel Stern (Cramer, 1986, 1987; Cramer and Stern, 1988), but in the UK we are only just starting to take advantage of these exciting developments. This paper aims to arouse interest in the method by describing and illustrating it, before briefly addressing the question of how we can encourage its use more widely.

Infant-parent psychotherapy relies on the assumption that there is no such thing as individual psychopathology in infancy. This does not mean that babies do not contribute individual difficulties from their side of the relationship. It does mean that symptoms in the infant can best be treated by treating the infant-parent relationship, rather than by treating either infant or parent separately. Like all short-term therapies, infant-parent psychotherapy is focused, and the focus is on the development of the infant who is always