“Seeing Things Through My Eyes”: understanding the baby’s perspective and contribution to psychodynamic couple and family work

Paul, C.  (2015). “Seeing Things Through My Eyes”: Understanding the Baby’s Perspective and Contribution to Psychodynamic Couple and Family Work. Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, 5(1) 1–5.

https://www.pep-web.org/toc.php?journal=cfp&volume=5

Abstract

To be an effective family therapist in work with babies, their siblings, and their parents, it is incumbent on the therapist to be able to develop their own capacity for embodied mentalizing, that is, to be able to read the baby’s communication and respond thoughtfully and in a reciprocal embodied way. How can we build this capacity within us to connect with babies? There are two powerful training tools that can be very helpful in developing the therapist’s capacity to effectively communicate with babies and parents: the Newborn Behavioural Observation system (NBO) (Nugent et al., 2007) and Infant Observation (Bick, 1964). As psychotherapists working with families with infants and very young children, we should extend our general skills and capacity for mentalizing to include establishing a real relationship with the infant as a person in order to understand the baby’s symptom and inner experience. Each family is inexorably changed with the arrival of a new baby and sometimes this change may appear to be for the worse. However, even in dire circumstances, the baby herself may be an agent of family growth; the baby thus becomes a significant therapist for her own family.