Fixed fantasies of loss and reunion in a mother-baby treatment of intergenerational trauma

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mother-baby pairs referred to the Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Outreach Program, in New York, are offered clinical services in urgent circumstances. Mothers are typically contending with crises stemming from poverty, loss, mental illness, and the various forms of social neglect, abuse, and racism built into New York City’s legal, educational, and foster-care systems. While dyadic interventions aim to develop parents’ attunement and reflective functioning towards their babies, the nature of the trauma these mothers have endured often shuts down the critical functions necessary for growth and change. In fact, aspects of their psychic life, in a unique survival mode, actively foreclose on new ways of relating; rather they remain tethered to early trauma with varied levels of representation. For example, the mother whom I write about in this paper, Janine, was transfixed by her own birth history in a way that preserved the force of her earliest pain and occluded the reality of her baby. A central therapeutic question is how to find a way into a mother’s closed system and build upon her healthy, loving wishes to care for her child. The therapist's capacity to enter these psychic voids and revive herself through reverie creates a path for intervention.