| Description |
Is infant mental health a strategy, or a way of being with? This presentation will consider the early days of our field, which was originally fueled by a deep scientific and psychoanalytic curiosity about the nuances of infant-parent interaction, the meaning of early experience, the remarkable transferences between parental early experience and parental relating to the child in the present. What is most important to us, now? Are we being lead to concreteness, and to manualized interventions that might more easily qualify as evidence-based, and which can be carried out by more affordable workers? Our pioneer and mentor, Selma Fraiberg, taught us mindfulness without ever using the then-unknown word. She taught us the bliss of modesty and not-knowing, of attunement, of following, of holding. She required the disciplines of self-knowing—including awareness of our own narratives—and of self-regulation. What would it mean, today, to be mindful, which is pretty much the very thing we hope parents can do? What happens, in the kitchen or the consulting room, when the goals of connection (the parent’s connection to the child, and ours to the parent) are met through our own disciplined presence, our attunement, our commitment to following and holding? Is the door then open to support the parent’s discovery of his/her own narrative, with concomitant increased capacity to mentalize the child and to imagine the child’s own evolving narratives?
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