Two-Person Relational Psychotherapy: Infants and Preschool Age Children

Abstract

We open this chapter with Freud’s masterful quote that captures the role children have as active participants in their development. For many years, infants were thought of as being dependent and unaware of the world around them (Mahler et al., Symbiosis and individuation: the psychological birth of the human infant. Basic Books, New York, 1975). The work by early developmental researchers—including Bowlby, Spitz, Emde, Stern, etc.—helped elucidate that infants were hardwired to develop complex abilities for social reciprocity, and if raised by parents with “good enough” capacities for affective attunement, the infants were quite busy in meaning-making processes. Tronick and Beeghly (Am Psychol 66(2):107–119, 2011) state, “In developing systems, such as human infants, sufficient resources must be obtained to enable them to increase their coherence and complexity and to self-organize new capacities.” Further, Bretherton and Munholland ’s (Internal working models in attachment relationships: a construct revisited. In: Cassidy J, Shaver PR (eds) Handbook of attachment: theory, research, and clinical applications. Guilford Press, New York, 1999) work reinforced the notion that interactions between infants and their parents gave meaning to their shared experiences, with the development of internal working models of attachment giving coherence to their relationships. When infants have emotionally available and affectively attuned parents, they develop secure working models in relating with others. When parents provide a secure base for the infant, it increases the likelihood of the infant acquiring the emotional resources needed in the short run, and in the long run, these growth-promoting social interactions will contribute to self-regulatory capacities and resiliency. Over time, infants become part of a larger and more complex system, and they become more flexible and better able to reorganize when confronted by day-to-day discontinuities in their care.

Every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him.

—Sigmund Freud