Mother and Child as Therapists to Each Other: A Psychoanalytic Version of Filial Therapy

This paper seeks to integrate two seemingly disparate areas and themes in the fields of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis: (1) The tendency of the child to be a therapist of the parent, especially as delineated by Searles (1975); (2) Filial therapy, which is the use of a parent as therapist. Marshall (1983) had begun the synthesis of these two areas by describing a process termed “sequence therapy” which denotes the progressive resolution of individual, dyadic, and group resistances operating in a family system.

What would prompt a child to be a therapeutic agent for the parent? The most parsimonious answer may be that caring for the parent has survival value. Without the parent, the baby/child dies or becomes defective. Searles (1975) hypothesized “… that innate among man's most powerful striving toward his fellow men, beginning in the earliest years and even earliest months of life, is an essentially psychotherapeutic striving” (p. 95). Earlier, Searles (1959) had introduced the idea that the child may remain in a symbiotic relationship with the mother in order for the mother to be sane. Marshall (1983) cites a case of an adolescent girl, eager to leave home, who formulated a plan to give birth to a baby and deed it to her symbiotic mother in order to prevent her mother's depression.