You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Pediatrician Claudia M. Gold comprehensively examines important core concepts of child development in language that can be understood by lay as well as professional readers. She reviews past and current researchers, beginning with British pediatrician and child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. She weaves his groundbreaking constructs into subsequent chapters, including primary maternal preoccupation, true self, the holding environment, and the good-enough mother.
Building on Winnicott’s work, Gold pursues the research of exemplary, contemporary practitioners whose case studies and clinical examples take the reader deeper into the neuroscience of the brain demonstrating how relationships can change the brain. She deals with clinical applications of the infant mental health paradigm. This exceptionally rich section reveals how the science of early childhood informs the therapeutic relationship. It begins with an in-depth early developmental history, listening for multi-generational loss and trauma, and treating sleep issues in a developmental-relations context. An undercurrent throughout the book and described in Chapter 9, “Reframing Postpartum Depression” is delineated using this infant mental-health perspective. While this problem has historically been ascribed to the mother, there are other subtleties to be understood. Gold shows how providing space, time, and deep listening to parents is primary. Each parent can experience an umbrella of emotional issues and psychological shifts in the postpartum period. For example: entering parenthood, coming to grips with issues from their own families and childhoods, ambivalence, social isolation, sleep deprivation, unrealistically quick return to functioning, changes in the dynamics of parental relationships, shifts in their families of origin, and a baby, too!
Gold is constant in her pursuit and use of the most salient, current research. The “mutual dysregulation process,” as one example, identifies
ways in which each mothe