Reconsidering Parent Involvement in Child Psychotherapy in the Light of Recent Developments in Attachment Theory: A Commentary on Papers by Warshaw, Pantone, and Aronson

The ways that child analysts conceive of their work with parents reflect the way their underlying theory integrates the intrapsychic and the interpersonal. While all analysts recognize some sort of interaction between the interpersonal and the intrapsychic, they vary in the relative primacy given in their theories to one or the other domain in development and the generation of experience. Some analysts, like Melanie Klein and most of her followers, give priority to the intrapsychic, in the sense that they see the child's interpersonal experience as largely generated out of the internal world in the form of projections. It follows, for such analysts, that the work focus on the internal world. Parent work becomes adjunctive, often carried out in the form of “parent guidance” sessions conducted by another professional, often not an analyst, in order to preserve the integrity of the focus on the intrapsychic in the analytic work proper. John Bowlby's work, followed by that of Stern and Beebe, as well as object relations theorists such as Winnicott and Fairbairn, reversed the priority by showing how the internal world was generated out of interpersonal experience, especially very early experience in the context of attachment experiences. With these theoretical developments, it became possible to conceive of analytically informed work with infants and toddlers via their parents (Fraiberg et al. 1987, Furman 1957), By influencing the way parents interacted with their young children, one could influence the development of the child's inner world, the facilitation of development having become an analytically respectable goal among ego psychologists. In the course of doing this work, Fraiberg, followed more recently by Stern (1995), Seligman (1999), and Silverman and Lieberman (1999) have shown how intertwined are the intrapsychic and the interpersonal between parent and child; the parent's internal world is reflected in the way he or she interacts with his or her child, whic