Parent Work in Analysis II—Children, Adolescents, and Adults: Recommendation, Beginning, and Middle Phases of Treatment

This paper continues our examination of parent work in the context of child, adolescent, and adult analysis. Moving forward from focus on evaluation, here we look at: making the recommendation, setting the frame, beginning the treatment, and the transition into the middle phase. As in our earlier work in this area, an underlying assumption is that treatment goals include parent development and restoration of the parent-child relationship.

Woven throughout our work with patients of different ages and pathologies, and now applied to work with parents, is a set of hypotheses concerning self-regulation and sources of self-esteem in everyone. Faced with experiences of helplessness, from whatever source, every person has to find a way to cope and feel good. These adaptations can be constructive and creative, building what we have called an “open system” of self-regulation. Alternatively and simultaneously, at any point in development, the individual has available pathological solutions based on omnipotent defenses, which we have described as a “closed system” (Novick and Novick 1999). The quality and form of love in relationships, including those between parents and between parents and child, relate to these two systems. Mutually enhancing relationships stem from and produce open-system functioning and growth, while closed-system functioning conduces to and is reinforced by sadomasochistic patterns of relating (Novick and Novick 1991, 1994, 1996a, b, 2000). Thus we might characterize the goals of treatment for parents in terms of their movement out of closed-system functioning with their child to more open-system self-regulation and relationship with each other and with the child. In Parent Work I, for instance, we noted beginning transformations in the quality of the love Henry's parents felt for him, and in their mutual respect as parents.

Evaluations are usually done for diagnostic purposes. When they are done by analysts, the goal is to reach beyond description to a sen