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Nr 16. 2007 sid. 11–22
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The tradition of mother-infant psychotherapy has its origins in the well-known work of the following authors. Margaret Mahler worked with psychotic children and their mothers. Selma Fraiberg worked with mothers and babies in difficult social situations. She spoke of ”ghosts in the nursery” in relation to phantasies of the parents about their child. By this she meant the re-emergence of significant objects of the life history of the parents in the actual situation, which are in relation to unconscious projective identifications. Donald W. Winnicott and Sèrge Lébovici are two further significant contributors, the latter having further developed the work of the former concerning therapeutic consultations. Here, the psychotherapist interacts mainly with the child, showing a particular educational attitude and playful behavior with the objective of helping the mother unblock conflictual situations and to offer her new possibilities of identification. The therapist is not concerned here with offering specific interpretations or uncovering the conflict that is resulting in the symptoms of the child. Systemic family therapy is neither concerned with the specific mother-child relationship nor by the unconscious dynamic underlying the symptoms of the child. In what follows, I will describe the practice of short-term mother-infant psychotherapy, including the concept of the parenthood conflict, as it was further developed by Bertrand Cramer, Francisco Palacio-Espasa and Juan Manzano in Geneva. Children up to the age of six are seen at the outpatient service of the university child psychiatric clinic. Older children are seen in the outpatient services of the Service Médico-Pédagogique, which corresponds to a general psychiatric outpatient service for school-age children and adolescents up to the age of 18 years. When taking the first appointment, it is left open for the parent, who should be present for the first interview. Most of the time the child will also attend the first appointment and if only one parent is present, and most of the time this is the mother, the other parent is kindly invited also to be present if this is possible. Individual appointments with parents are taken when this is necessary or seems helpful. According to the diagnoses, the situation will be handled within a large spectrum of possible interventions. This encompasses a certain number of therapeutic consultations with mother and child at one end of the spectrum, ongoing outpatient psychotherapy with the child, sometimes more than once a week, interventions of social workers, group psychotherapy, etc. and integration in therapeutic kindergarten or therapeutic day-care centers at the other end of the spectrum. ...
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Copyright: Allt material ©
MELLANRUMMET 2011-10-29 |
Stefan
Zlot, MD, är leg. vuxen, barn- och ungdomspsykiater samt kandidat vid
den schweiziska psykoanalytiska föreningen. Han utbildades i Genève
under ledning av professorerna F. Ladame och J. Manzano (Service
Médico-Pédagogique de Genève) samt B. Cramer och F. Palacio-Espasa (Clinique
Universitaire de Psychiatrie Infantile de Genève) och har därefter
arbetat i privat praktik i Genève och Bern samt som
organisationskonsult.
