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This book was published in 2018 and is the second book written by Salomonsson about his work offering psychodynamic interventions in pregnancy and infancy. Salomonsson describes the book as primarily written for psychotherapists, but it would also be useful for anyone interested in perinatal psychological well-being and infant mental health.
Bjorn Salomonsson is a psychoanalytic consultant based at a Child Health Centre in Stockholm. In his role in the clinic, he is available and accessible to families, nursing teams and perinatal staff working with parents and their babies. He provides direct psychoanalytic clinical work with parents and babies, including brief consultations and ongoing longer-term therapeutic work, in a responsive and timely manner. He is also able to work with families if needed in a private capacity. In addition, he works with the staff team at the clinic, offering consultation and supervision, helping the nurses develop their observational skills and encouraging them to notice their emotional experiences in response to the work they do, in coming into contact with parents and babies and how this may impact on them. Thus, the work of the clinic becomes imbued with applied psychoanalytic thinking.
This context is reminiscent to that of the work of Daws (1985) in her London GP surgery in the UK, where psychoanalytic practise took place by the ‘weighing scales’. It is a way of working within a community around the baby, where psychoanalytic thinking, principles and practice are universally integrated and available. The work is carried out at the very beginning of the development of the baby’s personality and mind, and essentially in the context of the parent baby relationship, and the parent’s own mind.
Salomonsson advocates in his book for every clinic to have a psychotherapist as one of the team, which is no doubt a worthwhile ideal. In the UK, we are now at a time when there is strong advocacy about this, through the diverse network of perinatal