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A collection of recent papers from The Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Training Program has been assembled for this edition of the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy. We were asked by the journal to serve as guest editors for this special edition and are honored to engage in the project. It is gratifying to be part of bringing these papers to publication to showcase the work of our graduates and the program itself. Each of us has worked with the authors in different ways, at first supporting them in the cultivation of their ideas and the refining of topics, and then in the writing process itself as their drafts moved toward completion. We also are grateful to Maria Fahey who read and commented on many of the papers and brought her professional eye to the editing process.
Serving as editors has afforded us time to reflect on the past seventeen years since the Parent-Infant Program began, and to think about the importance of the people and the ideas that have sustained us. In particular, we want to acknowledge and celebrate the long and significant arc of Anni Bergman’s career and her importance to us as a mentor, revered colleague and friend. She has helped nourish our ideas and has brought her vision, knowledge and wisdom to the Parent-Infant Program. She has drawn not only from her deep and important work with Margaret Mahler, but also, always, from her lively curiosity and open exploration of new findings, ideas and approaches.
In this introduction, we would like to describe aspects of Anni Bergman’s early work with Margaret Mahler that we see as foundational to her teaching and to our approach to infant observation, to the study of infant development, and to parent-infant psychotherapy. We will
then describe The Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Training Program and the papers in this volume written by some recent graduates.
Anni Bergman’s collaboration with Margaret Mahler began at the Masters Children’s Center, a research setting established for the study