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Psychoanalytic therapy with infants and parents: practice, theory and results investigates a branch of psychoanalytic work that is becoming increasingly important, exploring the efficacy and the insight that therapy of a parent together with their infant offers to students of early emotional development. Its author is Stockholm-based Björn Salomonsson, an experienced psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who practises at the Department of Women's and Children's Health, Karolinska Institutet, at the Mama Mia Child Health Centre, and in private practice. Dr Salomonsson also has considerable experience as a researcher, conducting studies into the efficacy of psychoanalytic work with infants, young children and parents.
This is his first book, which brings together the fruits of his research to date; in it the author focuses on what he calls ‘baby worries’, how the mother's own preoccupations may affect her engagement with her baby, and how the baby responds in turn. The author asks whether ‘parent infant therapy may be integrated within classical Freudian theory’ (p. 12) and puts forward the hypothesis that in psychoanalytic work of this kind, the baby may form a transference relationship with the therapist, which would be a tool in its own right in therapy. Salomonsson brings his experience as a psychoanalyst and researcher to bear in tackling this ambitious task and tries to develop an argument for the effectiveness of psychoanalytic work – the understanding of unconscious motivations – with parents and infants.
The book is divided into 11 chapters and is extensively referenced. The author's enthusiasm and commitment to his work are unmistakable, as is his commitment to developing an evidence base for it. The earlier chapters (Chapters 1–6) take the reader through a range of cases, from 1-month-old Nic (Chapter 1) to 16-month-old Beate (Chapter 5), and include a discussion of an adult patient, Monica, of whom the author makes an example of ‘the infant within the adult’. In th