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This letter was sent to us as a follow-up to the authors’ paper ‘Infant-led innovations in a mother-baby therapy group’ (Journal of Child Psychotherapy, Vol 23, No. 2, August 1997)
We are sending you a summary of our paper on therapeutic work with young infants, which we hope will be of interest to readers. It was presented at the conference titled The Interplay of Infants, Parents and Therapists here in Melbourne in 1996. It represents the work and thinking of the Infant Mental Health Group of the Royal Children's Hospital for more than two decades and marks a departure from currently accepted notions of infant-parent psychotherapy with very young infants.
Our central point was that in doing therapeutic work with infants in the first year we change the infant's internal representations. This has significant effects on interaction and symptoms, and direct work may be particularly indicated where parents seem unable to use their thinking to make links. Clinicians generally hold that if the parents’ representations change there will be a change in interaction and symptom. We are proposing that we examine change in the other direction, if the infant's representations are affected and this impinges on the parents. We made four points: that the infant cannot wait; that if we interact with imitation and attunement it can have a very powerful effect; that experience organizes the brain; and that we may previously have been over-anxious about the parents’ feelings about our involvement.
In 1976, Ferholt and Provence said that in their experience no infant is too young to be engaged in direct therapeutic work but we think this