Clinical interventions via Skype with parents and their young children

Abstract

In this article, the author discusses her experience of working with six families from two Greek islands. She focuses on her reflections and reservations on using cyber-communication technology in brief psychoanalytic parent–infant psychotherapy. Communication technology may be a useful way of providing support to families with young children living in remote areas without mental health services. Advances in cyber-communication have created the possibility of offering timely, primary mental health care to prevent difficulties becoming chronic and complex. The parent–infant psychotherapy focuses mainly on emotional difficulties related to stress in the parents’ and infant’s life and on transgenerational problems. The use of cyber-communication (Skype) for this work raises many issues and difficulties and the need for changes in technique, the expectation of technical difficulties and interruptions, the absence of physical proximity, differences in establishing the therapeutic relationship, the working alliance, transference and counter transference phenomena and in the power of unconscious processes.