Parenting A Damaged Child—Mourning, Regression, and Disappointment

Two decades ago (1962) Solnit and Stark published their now classic paper “Mourning and the Birth of a Defective Child.” In that paper, they described and theorized about a range of experiences with parenting a developmentally retarded child. They based their ideas on a review of the important work on normal parenting by Bibring, Benedek, A. Freud, and others who worked within the perspective of classical libido and conflict theory. In the 25 years since the paper's publication, there have been significant additions to psychoanalytic clinical theory, in particular the self psychology of Heinz Kohut (1971, 1977) and others influenced by his ideas. The perspective of self psychology enhances the richness of the psychoanalytic theory pertaining to parenting a damaged child, and not incidentally also to parenting normal children. The purpose of this paper is to add self psychology to the more familiar psychoanalytic perspectives that illuminate the behavior and experiences of theories pertaining to parents as they struggle to accept and respond to their damaged children. In particular, parental feelings of rage, depression, and ambivalence will be the focus.

First will be a case vignette illustrating a typical sequence of experiences and behaviors of parents in the crisis following their defective infant's birth, and their subsequent long-term problems parenting such a child. Additional vignettes, along with clinical descriptions of parents' responses to a variety of neonatal illnesses, can be found in a recent paper by Mintzer, Als, Tronick, and Berry (1984). Following the clinical material will be a review of several