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The question of what is genuine maternal love was posed by a mother struggling to understand and value the nature of her bond with her small baby. The question surfaced time and again in the context of this dyad's long-term parent-infant psychotherapy and has challenged me to examine my thinking and, indeed, has produced impassioned discussions within the Parent Infant Project team at the Anna Freud Centre. In this paper I will address this question through sessional material of this mother and baby and discuss issues of technique in response to it, including my countertransference and conceptualization.
Asked about her position on the different heuristic models of the mind, Anna Freud replied: “I definitely belong to the people who feel free to fall back on the topographical aspects whenever convenient and to leave them aside and speak purely structurally when that is convenient” (Sandler with Anna Freud 1981). Parentinfant psychotherapy is a meeting point for the different disciplines addressing infant development: psychoanalysis, attachment, and neurobiological research. In facilitating our understanding of the ebb and flow of the therapeutic construction, Anna Freud's advocacy of conceptual flexibility in the aid of clinical expediency is often helpful.
The therapist working with young babies growing up in an environment of intergenerational deficits needs to understand the quality
of mothering and the baby's predicament. Psychoanalytic concepts of “good enough parenting” and maternal failure, attachment paradigms of “security” and “disorganization,” and neuropsychological discussion of relational trauma are useful frames of reference. Yet there is an additional ingredient to do with love, captured by the patient in her question: How can we integrate love into scientific and clinical discussion?
“Genuine maternal love” for the mother who asked the question was defined by selflessness. My clinical work has convinced me that the love of a mother for her infant and