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The Practice of Psychoanalytic Parent–infant Psychotherapy: Claiming the Baby
Tessa Baradon with Carol Broughton, Iris Gibbs, Jessica James, Angela Joyce and Judith Woodhead
London: Routledge, 2005
216 pp., £19.99
Intimate Transformations: Babies with their Families
Jeanne Magagna, Nancy Bakalar, Hope Cooper, Jaedene Levy, Christine Norman and Carolyn Shank
London: Karnac, 2005
242 pp., £19.99
Despite major differences in style, tone and purpose, both of these books describe ways of understanding babies and their families, and raise some interesting questions about different ways of being ‘therapeutic’. The Practice of Psychoanalytic Parent–infant Psychotherapy, coming from the Anna Freud Centre's Parent–infant Project, describes direct therapeutic intervention with families where help is urgently needed to prevent difficulties in parent–infant relationships from becoming acute crises. Intimate Transformations describes an international video-linked infant observation seminar group run by Jeanne Magagna at the Tavistock Clinic, with reflections on the individual babies and families observed, descriptions of applied work, and finally the authors’ own experiences within this ‘affective learning’ group.
One of the most striking contrasts between the two books is in their reflection of the different responses of a clinician and an observer: clinicians feel the pressure to act fast in response to the urgency of a baby's need, while observers may struggle with the experience of observing without having permission to act at all.