Commentary on “Video Feedback with a Depressed Mother and Her Infant”

This paper takes us through a journey in which a gifted and dedicated therapist adjusts her way of treating a severely depressed mother when she realizes that the mother's depression has compromised the baby's development. From then on, we are treated to the account of a most unusual and productive collaboration between a psychoanalyst therapist and a psychoanalyst researcher. Phyllis Cohen begins the treatment of the mother in a relatively traditional way, seeing her alone, and at the same time seeing to it that the baby's needs are tended to by a caretaker who lives in the home. But when the mother brings the baby into a therapy session, she realizes how profoundly misattuned the mother is to the baby's needs. This misattunement arises from the intrusion of the mother's needs to have her baby respond to her. Throughout the treatment we hear a refrain from the mother when she interacts with her baby: “Give Mommy a kiss.” Her needs for the baby's love interfere with her ability to respond to him. She constantly intrudes and overstimulates. At this point the therapist arranges a consultation with Beatrice Beebe, who videotapes the mother-baby and father-baby dialogue. We are then treated to a detailed microanalysis of their ways of being together.

The paper is of great interest and importance because it interweaves the closely observed interactions of the baby with the mother, father, and stranger with the treatment of the mother, the unraveling and working through of her conflicts with her family of origin. It is only when it becomes possible to treat these conflicts in their own right, which helps the mother to her new sense of a separate identity, that she is able to respond to the baby in his own right instead of demanding that he respond to her. At the same time, it is the work with mother and baby together that makes it possible for the mother to go through the painful process of becoming a person in her own right with her family of origin. In the course of this