Feeding Problems and Relationship Difficulties: Therapeutic Work with Parents and Infants

Watching the behaviour of recently-born lambs and their ewe mothers one Easter on a Welsh hill-side, I saw the instinctive ‘homing-in’ by lambs to their mothers, and the searching and claiming by mothers of their offspring. Identifying at different times with one or the other, at one moment I was distressed when a lamb wandered bleating from one ewe to another, rebuffed by each one in turn; where was it's mother? At other moments I felt myself flinching as lambs hurled themselves on their mothers and roughly and imperiously rooted straight onto their nipples.

It is obvious from these examples that something was going on about feeding as a part of a mother-infant relationship that aroused strong emotional reactions, even in an uninvolved outside observer. My first reactions were often of empathy with one or other of the nursing couple. I hope that as a devotee of parent-infant work my ability to encompass both sides of the relationship was quickly mobilised. But it is relevant to point out that, in such an emotive area, any one of us can be drawn, without noticing it, to a one-sided view.

In this paper I will look at infant feeding, both by breast and by bottle, in the context of the development of the relationship between the infant and its mother and father. I will not generally be thinking about the infant on his or her own, whether in the context of successful feeding, or of problems in feeding that would seem to stem from deep disturbances in the infant. Crucial is what the infant's parents bring to the relationship from their experience and memories of being with their own parents. Carrying on this theme all ‘helpers’, such as doctors, nurses or health visitors trying to assist in establishing feeding, or psychotherapists stepping in at a later stage, may have attributed to them some aspect of the ideas about parents that these mothers and fathers have in their minds.

The subject of infant feeding is so fraught because it is literally a matter of life and death: a