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Dr. Mallouh’s paper beautifully depicts the tumultuous process of transition into motherhood with Dr. Mallouh’s sensitive interventions. As Fraiberg (Fraiberg et al., 1983) mentions in her paper on treatment modalities, multiple components of interaction construct a live intervention: brief crisis intervention, developmental guidance, and representation-oriented Infant-Parent Psychotherapy (IPP). Dr. Mallouh sensitively applies each intervention, according to the moment-to-moment need of the mother in the therapeutic sessions. In doing so, she had to tolerate and contain a great deal of emotional turbulence and upheaval. This way of being in her intervention was felt as vigilant and intuitive, demonstrating a total commitment to protect and prevent her unstable patients from collapsing into mental breakdown.
Infant-Parent Psychotherapy (IPP) encompasses a realm of primitive non-verbal, visceral, and affective communication, which plays a crucial role during birth and early stages of life. The “felt sense,” as Peter Levine (1997) describes, is a crucial task for the therapist to attune to, explore, and track in both the patient and the therapist herself, in any trauma treatment. Although clearly articulated in her presentation, the challenge must have been to survive and adapt to whatever needs that would come to and overwhelm the therapist in the mothers’ frantic plea for help to protect the lives of their babies from the outer and inner impingements of daily childrearing needs and their uncontrollable negative emotions. Psycho-evolutionary perspectives on human development over time denote this as the reality of each and every human birth and earliest childrearing days, filled with swiftly changing moments of helplessness, despair, and confusion mingled with blissful happiness and hopeful anticipations. With Dr. Mallouh’s compassionate presence alongside her patients, they eventually reclaim a sense of self grounded in the shared reality of the moment.
The therapist’